Poemm Emoir Stor Y 2 01 6

Number Fifteen/2016 Number $10.00

poemmemoirstory 2016 Amy Bailey Amy Ball Kimberly Barr Tina Bartlett Heather Black Rapp Emily M. L. Brown Cho Grace Casie Cook Crowe Melissa Deason Jude Hawkins Mollie Jones Ashley Lee Kateema McElroy Colleen J. McFaden Jamie McMillan-Holifield Michelle Samantha Pious Polk Sharanna Rems Emily Mary Ruefle Saphra Jacqueline Secord Laura Slor Zhanna Alina Stefanescu Stewart Julie Teitleman Judith Urazbaeva Yellena White Gail ..

PMSpoemmemoirstory

PMS poemmemoirstory appears once a year. We accept unpublished, original submissions of poetry, memoir, and short fiction during our January 1 through March 31 reading period. We accept simultaneous submissions; however, we ask that you please contact us immediately if your piece is published elsewhere so we may free up space for other authors. While PMS is a journal of exclusively women’s writing, the subject field is wide open. We strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with PMS before submitting. You can find links on our Web site to some examples of what we publish in the pages of PMS 8, PMS 9, and PMS 14. We ask that you limit your submission to either five poems or 15 pages of prose (4,300 words or less). We look forward to reading your work. Please send all submissions to https://poemmemoirstory.submittable.com/submit. There is a $3 fee, which covers costs associated with our online submissions system.

For any other correspondence, contact us at poemmemoirstory@gmail. com.

PMS poemmemoirstory is a member of the Council of Literary Maga- zines and Presses (CLMP) and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). Indexed by the Humanities International Index and in Feminist Periodicals: A Current Listing of Contents, PMS poemmemoirstory is distributed to the trade by Ingram Periodicals, 1226 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086-7000. patrons

College of Arts and Sciences The University of Alabama at Birmingham

The Department of English, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Margaret Harrill Robert Morris, M.D. C. Douglas Witherspoon, M.D.

friends Sandra Agricola Andrew Glaze Dail W. Mullins Jr. Daniel Anderson Robert P. Glaze Michael R. Payne Rebecca Bach Randa Graves Robert Lynn Penny George W. Bates Ron Guthrie Lee and Pam Person Peter and Miriam Bellis Ward Haarbauer William Pogue Claude and Nancy Ted Haddin Kieran Quinlan & Bennett John Haggerty Mary Kaiser Randy Blythe Richard Hague Jim Reed James Bonner Sang Y. Han Steven M. Rudd F.M. Bradley Jeff Hansen Rusty Rushton Mary Flowers Braswell Tina Harris John Sartain Jim Braziel Jessica Heflin Janet Sharp Karen Brookshaw Patti Callahan Henry Danny Siegel Bert Brouwer Pamela Horn Juanita Sizemore Edwin L. Brown Jennifer Horne Martha Ann Stevenson Donna Burgess William Hutchings Lou Suarez Linda Casebeer Lanier Scott Isom Susan Swagler Alicia K. Clavell Joey Kennedy Jeane Thompson John E. Collins Sue Kim Drucilla Tyler Robert Collins Marilyn Kurata Catherine Danielou Ruth and Edward Maria Vargas Jim L. Davidson Lamonte Adam Vines Michael Davis Beverly Lebouef Daniel Vines Denise Duhamel Ada Long Larry Wharton Charles Faust Susan Luther Elaine Whitaker Grace Finkel John C. Mayer Jacqueline Wood Edward M. Friend III James Mersmann John M. Yozzo Stuart Flynn Will Miles Carol Prejean Zippert staff editor-in-chief Kerry Madden managing editor Melba Major senior editors Halley Cotton, Poem Jamie McFaden, Memoir Cheyenne Taylor, Story assistant editors Christia Givens Jennie Tippett Kathy Shows Jason Walker Laura Simpson Erin Blankenship business managers Pamela M. Parker administrative assistants Christia Givens cover design Michael J. Alfano cover art “The Orchid Electric,” photograph by Kimberly Ball production/printing 47 Journals, LLC contents from the Editor-in-Chief 1 poemmemoirstory Jacqueline Saphra Aubade 7

Tina Barr Still Life 8

Heather Bartlett When I Was a Boy 10

Michelle McMillan-Holifield When Morgan Freeman Reads T.S. Eliot 11

Kateema Lee Legacy 12

Laura Secord Taking One for Angela 13

Ashley Jones Birmingham Fire and Rescue Haiku, 1963 15 De Soto Leaves a Negro 16 How to Make Your Daughters Culturally Aware and Racially Content During Christmastime 18 List of Famous Alabama Slaves 20 Corn Silk Barbie 21

Colleen J. McElroy Lessons in Deportment 22 Learning to Love Bessie Smith 29 Jude Deason Great Aunt Mona 30

Gail White Dame Edith Sitwell 31

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter Euphemism 32 The Bathroom 34 Waiting for Another Call from My Sister in the Middle of the Night 35 Back to Jackson 36 Before The Birth of Venus 37 contents…

Samantha Pious Le Violon 38 The Violin 39 Sur la Place Publique 40 Above the Public Place 42

M. L. Brown Running 44 Synonym for Lichen 45

Kate Daniels Reading a Biography of Thomas Jefferson in the Months of My Son’s Recovery 47

Mary Ruefle South on Seven 52 Jean 53 The Failure of Poetry 54 poemmemoirstory Melissa Crowe Caro Nome 57

Mollie Hawkins On Weddings 60

Sharanna Polk Forever Flint 64

Zhanna Slor What’s Five Feet in Front of You 72

Amy Bailey Woman’s Body Found 80

Grace Cho Crust Girl 87

Casie Cook A Temporary Vessel 97 poemmemoirstory Alina Stefanescu Carpool 107 Emily Rems Andy 114 Judith Teitelman Guesthouse for Ganesha 123 contents…

Julie Stewart By a Thread 133 Yellena Urazbaeva The Gospel According to the Mother 142 Jamie McFaden An Interview with Emily Rapp Black 163 contributors 169

f r o m t h e editor-in-chief

Dear Reader,

I’ve been thinking about the late Alabama writer, Helen Norris Bell, who I interviewed for an essay published in Five Points: A Journal of Art & Literature several years ago. Helen told me, “I hear the voice of the story when I’m writing, and then I try to set the words on fire and then maybe they will burn.” Helen was always writing, but raising a family and teaching took up so much of her attention that it wasn’t until she retired from Huntingdon College that she really focused on her writing. To put it another way, she was born in 1916 and her first book of stories, The Christmas Wife, was published in 1985, at the age of 69. (She died in 2013 at the age of 97.) I spoke with Helen on summer afternoons in 2007 and 2008 in Black Mountain, North Carolina in an assisted living facility after she’d been moved from her home in Montgomery, Alabama at her son’s direction. Helen was a contemporary of Mary Ward Brown (Tongues of Flame and It Wasn’t All Dancing); Kathryn Tucker Windham (Thirteen Alabama Ghosts, Odd-Egg Editor, Alabama: One Big Front Porch, and many others); and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watch Man.) In fact, I went to visit Helen to interview her about a Harper Lee book I was working on, but Helen was so fascinating and not at all interested in discussing “Nelle Harper.” Instead, we talked about stories and poetry— what makes good stories and how poetry is critical to the language of short stories. Helen said, “A short story has to have the depth of a novel, but the focus of a poem.” Then, in the cacophony of the nursing home, she advised setting the words on fire. And so, dear reader, welcome to PoemMemoirStory 15 where our contributors, like Helen Norris Bell, have set their own poems, memoirs, and stories on fire too. The poetry in this issue is one of our strongest ever—powerful, eclec- tic, and unflinching with verse that burns a hot white light. I am grateful to Melba Major, who personally wrote to Mary Ruefle, who generously offered three poems of such distilled and haunting verse. We have Kate

PMS.. 1 Daniels’ “Reading a Biography of Thomas Jefferson in the Months of My Son’s Recovery,” a narrative poem of Jefferson, addiction, and a mother latching onto a vision in order to survive. Our poets, Ashley Jones, Kateema Lee, Colleen J. McElroy, and Laura Secord have all written poems that reflect on race and the ever-present past in a collective fiery ode to what is happening in our nation today. After Helen Norris Bell wrote fifty poems, she began to write prose and said, “I used the techniques of poetry to write my stories. With stories you have to whittle it down. You have once chance to get your point across.” Melissa Crowe’s brief lyric essay “Caro Nome” manages to get the point across, layer after layer, all the wondrous possibilities (or not) of names and the weight and meaning of names. Sharanna “Rain” Polk gives us the geography of Flint, Michigan and the boys who died and the broken mothers and grandmothers left behind in her wrenchingly matter-of-fact essay, “Forever Flint.” Mollie Hawkins hilariously blazes with her loathing of weddings as a sidekick wedding photographer to her father in the Deep South, and we get to experience abundance and the warmth of making of pies in Grace Cho’s “Crust Girl,” in which she chronicles the life of her mother who makes pies to forget life in Korea in order to prove she belongs in America. In our fiction, we’re so grateful to include Yellena Urazbaeva’s wildly imaginative “The Gospel According to Mother,” a tale of Mary and Joseph that transports us to a village near the Black Sea, while Alice Sefanescu’s “Carpool” shines a searing spotlight on the mental brutal- ity and despair of the dreaded carpool lane at school. Judith Teitelman’s “Guesthouse for Ganesha” is excerpted from her novel about an exiled and expert seamstress, Esther, during World War II whose needlework is as pierced and perfect as the needles in her heart. We close PMS 15 with an interview with the extraordinary writer, Emily Rapp Black, who came to visit and speak to UAB students this past year to talk about writing and to share her experiences of writing Still Point of the Turning World about the life and death of her beautiful boy, Ronan, who died of Tay-Sachs. Black says, “By engaging in making art, I could think about something hopeful, because there is hope in the act of making something out of nothing.” Finally, PoemMemoirStory would not exist without the support of outgoing chair, Peter Bellis, and our new chair, Alison Chapman, whose

2 PMS.. own essays about teaching Paradise Lost in Alabama’s Donaldson Prison have appeared in these pages in prior issues. We are very grateful for the support of the Patrons and Friends of the Creative Writing Program at UAB as well as to CAS, College of Arts and Sciences, and especially to Dr. Robert Palazzo, who has made sure a copy of PoemMemiorStory was delivered to every faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences from the beginning of his tenure here at UAB. I’d also very much like to thank my amazing staff of editors who have helped every step of the way to make PoemMemoirStory 15 happen. Thank you to Halley Cotton, poetry editor; Jamie McFaden, memoir editor; and Cheyenne Taylor, fiction editor; and of course, to our managing editor, Melba Major, for her tremendous attention to detail and vision for the magazine. Thank you also to the smart and funny readers in Christia Givens, Kathy Shows, Laura Simpson, Jennie Tippet, Erin Blankenship, and Jason Walker, whose wonderful reading and comments helped shape this new issue. Thank you Russell Helms, as always, for design and layout and Linda Frost, whose vision launched PoemMemoirStory fifteen years ago. Thank you also to the English Department Faculty at UAB and especially to my Creative Writing colleagues here at UAB for their continued support and commitment. Thank you also to Liz Hughey and her husband, Chip Brantley, creators/owners of Desert Island Supply Company, DISCO, who give us a reading space and venue for our publication parties to celebrate the new work in each issue of PoemMemoirStory. Our cover features the stunning pyrotechnics of Kimberly Ball’s photography. Melba Major says, “The image captures the natural world in a way that begs to be anthropomorphized. The orchid is sexy, electric, and dangerous—like a badass neon burlesque showgirl.” Jay Jessee, another professor in UAB’s English department, concurs, aptly describing it as “post-human Georgia O’Keefe.” We still continue to gather and collect children’s books for the “Aid to Inmate Mothers Story Book Project” at the Tutwiler Women’s Prison in Wetumpka, Alabama, and I’m grateful to Larnetta Moncrief, the director of the program, where incarcerated mothers are recorded reading stories to their children. This is issue is dedicated to Helen Norris Bell—a writer who tried to set her words on fire to see if they would burn.

PMS.. 3 Thank you, Helen Norris Bell, and thank you to all you readers and writers of PoemMemoirStory. May you all set your own words on fire and let them burn.

Kerry Madden Editor-in-Chief PMS poemmemoirstory 15

Note: Works by Helen Norris Bell include the story collections: The Christmas Wife, Water into Wine, The Burning Glass, One Day in the Life of a Born-Again Loser and Other Stories, and two poetry collections: Whatever Is Round and Rain Pulse. Her papers are in the Special Collections at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

4 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

Jacqueline Saphra

Aubade

Emboldened by still waters, lulled in the forgiving light before true waking, love, old monster, surfaces, hippo-slow, remembers its belly filled with ecstasies and hungers, forgets its cargo of fractures, promises, debates over how much heat, how much air, where to place the furniture.

Love’s old body, scarred and faithful, is blessed.

PMS.. 7 Tina Barr

Still Life

A fish, black-striped, articulates with its fin a message through water, (no dancer’s hand so able to ripple.)

Utterly clear, the surface a glass on which leaves edge, one curled fingerbowl of maple caught by wind sent in a spin, (taut over water’s table.)

Hydrangeas purple early in July, coalesce to dusty blue. Flocked petals are dipped in teals, smoke greens, maroons (as sedum gone pink to brown across a spectrum.)

My eyes rest in their complexities, iridescent scales, rich as watercolor soaked into paper fiber.

Hydrangeas composed as if separate petals were tiny flocking fish or congregations of moths.

8 PMS.. Starlings etch silhouettes (like black valentines.) Geese drag their geometry, its Morphic pull, across the sky.

Spiders inhabit the inner rooms of hydrangea bloom, palaces of color, petals compelled to change their Chinese silks, billows that scrub from the world its snarls, (my minister’s sins, back taxes.)

As if a hand reached out, pressed down green cotton balls of treetops, sponges soft as the bank’s mattress of moss, (close in as hydrangeas.)

PMS.. 9 Heather Bartlett

When I Was a Boy

, but what about the bones we collected & buried, the bowl of broken pencils under the bed— this was how we prayed with the snap of yellow & lead.

10 PMS.. Michelle McMillan-Holifield

When Morgan Freeman Reads T.S. Eliot

Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium. —T.S. Eliot

Freeman reading poetry shakes the skeletal bone yard of the soul. He shawls along the neck, lays bare the moon-bit body of Eliot’s windy night.

His vocals drum and churn coax Eliot from dim recitations, regurgitations of stiff words on pages.

Eliot, ferocious with blues, ripe with soul slides electric fingers over a dobro.

One by one, strings snap like bones.

PMS.. 11 Kateema Lee

Legacy

I was born of Virginia Slims and sin. My mother jokes that I came out smelling like menthols and crying Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues.”

My mother was born of leaving. Her father left after war and warring streets, her mother, the queen of Hartford projects, lived on high balls, was absent between bottles.

My father was born of church and Sunday dinners. He says his nearly white mother sang “Precious Lord, take my hand…,” but she hated his pale skin, his godless green eyes, his hatred for Sunday dinners.

His father, silent for years, died without saving him. My father left when I was ten and God left soon after. In church I was told that earth’s soil births bloom and seed.

Is it legacy to carry absence in harvest baskets, to toss shovel and spade, to continue to dig fingers deep into arid soil, hoping to sow and grow something when nothing takes hold?

12 PMS.. Laura Secord

Taking One for Angela

She was shining on the stage at the 16th Street Baptist, that legendary church. Her wild dreads were touched with gold. She told a story of her girlhood in the segregated 60’s. She spoke fluent French, so she liked to play a visitor from Paris in the department stores. With a broken English flair and perfect François, she charmed the tight white matrons into opening the dressing room doors, and bringing her the best designer’s fashions.

I waited in the signing queue, thinking how I’d tell Angela Davis of my teenage bond with her—

Remembering how it began at the dinner table while we watched Hogan’s Heroes. Dad came to the table, his plate loaded with food— This show’s been on so long that they’re running out of war. I had a ready answer— They ought to make a show about Vietnam, it could go on forever… The fight began. It was 1971, and ideology rocked our house as it rocked the outside world. Inside, the 17- year-old anti-war teen and her conservative father. Out there Kent State, Hard Hat Riot, March on Washington, Vietnam teach-ins every Friday in the courtyard at San Carlos High School.

PMS.. 13 Mother cleared the table, humming amidst our screams. Much later in the kitchen, she told me to apologize, Your father loves you, just give him a hug and tell him you are sorry.

I said the words— Let’s make up, I love you, I’m sorry for this fight. My head ached from yelling.

We were close, my arms around his neck. I’m hard on you, he said, because I don’t want you to end up like Angela Davis.

Angela was all over the news, speaking out against the war and the crime of American prisons. She was the FBI’s most wanted, afro-tall, a radical and eloquent professor.

I had to answer. I would be proud to be like Angela Davis.

His fist slammed my eye.

I leapt away.

My black/blue/red/yellow bruise was a badge for Angela.

And here I stand to tell her, my hand embraced in hers— I took a black eye for you when I was seventeen.

14 PMS.. Ashley Jones

Birmingham Fire and Rescue Haiku, 1963

What about us said we were on fire? What said extinguish quickly, fill up the hose and set the dogs loose? Could they smell our confusion? Or was it our singing? Were our voices like sirens, a chorus of blood?

We were wet black seeds in that raw Birmingham flesh— we germinated.

Did the photos show our fingers stretching like roots? Did they show our eyes, how they reached sunward, to the hot, bright, silent star that could turn water to steam, seeds to fruit? Did they see themselves become our fertilizer?

PMS.. 15 Ashley Jones

De Soto Leaves a Negro

“After twenty-five days had been passed at the capital of Coosa, De Soto marched in the direction of the Tallapoosa, leaving behind a Christian negro, too sick to travel, whom the Indians desired to retain among them on account of his singular hair and sable complexion. He recovered, and was doubtless the distant ancestor of the dark-colored savages seen in that region in more modern times.” —History of Alabama, and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, Albert James Pickett

A gift of sick skin. A sac of black and bronze. You are presented alongside two swine, a few discs of bacon and fatback— a body is a body is a body.

The armada strode like God across the water— America, a jungle promising gold. You will leave this cavalry at Tallapoosa. You will watch them march with destiny in their heels, and you will heal among these brown people.

Years from now, your sons will walk, darkly, along these banks, their skin beating with the sickness of the chain and the whip. 16 PMS.. They will look upon their beating skin and hear you singing— their eyes will swirl with pride, riverside.

PMS.. 17 Ashley Jones

How to Make Your Daughters Culturally Aware and Racially Content During Christmastime

Remind them that Jesus is Black. Despite the pictures Granny has hung on the wall, despite the glowing good old boy on her pile of church fans, Jesus was a brother. A bruh, not a bro. Hair of wool, you tell them.

Purchase a nativity set that reflects this truth. Mary with her press and curl, Joseph with a fade, baby Jesus fresh out the womb and curly.

Go to a roadside shop that sells Christmas decorations. Step out of the car. Buy a pale, smiling Santa. Let your daughters wonder how he turned brown overnight— how Santa’s smiling face became just like their own, brown and buttery, a Yuletide miracle.

18 PMS.. When you’re trimming your plastic tree— the one you’ve had since the 80’s, put on some holiday music: “Rudolph” bopped by the Temptations, “Deck the Halls” by Smokey, Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas,” and Gladys Knight’s deep, brown voice crooning “Jingle Bells.”

Fill the treeskirt with tightly-wrapped gifts. Anticipate the unbreakable smiles of your daughters when they rip off the paper to reveal an army of Black Barbies and brown baby dolls.

PMS.. 19 Ashley Jones

List of Famous Alabama Slaves

Jennie, who begat Jake, who begat Charity, Lizze, and Rev, who begat Esther, who begat Daniel, who begat Dave, Georgia, George, Emma, Oliver, and Maugan, who begat Alonza, who bought his own farm, which begat tomatoes and carrots and collard greens and watermelons and corn and green beans and blackberries and a single perfect peach, but absolutely never any cotton.

20 PMS.. Ashley Jones

Corn Silk Barbie

Every woman must have a shape, and the glass Coke bottle is just the right one— we remember the cool sweet truth we poured down our teenaged throats and the fizz that made us forget Alabama, Tuscaloosa Street, empty town and waves of heat.

Mama made us— me, sister, and Birmingham cousins— shuck corn on the back porch stairs. Now, the green husks are perfect cloth for an evening gown, the silks for hair— what man can resist that sweet, wet shine of summer corn?

The mouth of the soda bottle is as ripe as a scalp, and our giggles are just shrill enough to match the glass clinks our dolls make as they dance at our command and shimmy to our twinkling, muddy, imagined beat.

PMS.. 21 Colleen J. McElroy

Lessons in Deportment

1. for over a year I lived at Aunt Jennie’s with my cousins, the two Jeans all of us having run away from our mothers to the safety of Jennie and in my case safe from Uncle Brother too one-two-three we arrived motherless homeless here comes another one just like the other one Aunt Claudia said all us girls being there could only mean Jennie was running a house like Aunt Dora Emma did during the time of Prohibition Aunt Jennie called her a box-ankle heifer and dared her to repeat what she had said Claudia didn’t come to sit a spell for weeks

Jennie, the aunt with no children, took us girls ripening into our teens come calling between pee pants and first periods

22 PMS.. house rules Jennie said; no sass no lip and none of us allowed to treat her like she was our mother and our yes ma’am sounding too weak and practiced Jennie staring dead at us for the longest time before she said we were too dumb to know the difference between a salad fork and a nose pick so every night one of us would set the table with more silverware than we’d ever use

“begin with the one nearest the plate” she said and moved us from chowing down hobo style to sitting for our supper we cleaned up nice by Saturday left the kitchen neat and tidy heading for the Y to belly rub at the sock hop

3. the Jeans and I hated doing laundry so we hid dirty clothes all over the house one morning we woke up to Jennie raging: pulling down curtains, tearing off bed sheets throwing towels and anything washable

PMS.. 23 in a pile that she pointed to yelling: “you will not leave this house until everything is clean, you hear me?” this time we said yes ma’am with bowed heads and a silent prayer that she’d found all the clothes all the time wondering how a woman her size could move so fast

4. she lined us up in the basement like army recruits—me the oldest at the head of the line followed by the two Jeans: one-two-three

“wash-rinse-press!” she ordered we looked at the Maytag wringer the scrub board and steam press we looked at the basement walls blistered with sweat and the morning sun not yet clearing the top of the oak tree in the back yard how could we make it to noon?

5. one afternoon Aunt Jennie found me reading a Prince Valiant comic book 24 PMS.. she snatched it from me before I could convince her it was history knights of the Round Table and all that “go in there and read Papa’s books” she said and pushed me toward the leather bound volumes ready for the taking there were so many words and the two Jeans peering between the crack of the sliding door snickering about homework avoided by all but the spineless keep rolling your eyes and they’ll get stuck Jennie said

6. when my family moved into a new house with Uncle Brother, Aunt Jennie had managed to pry Papa’s books away from Claudia “hand over fist” she grinned

I remembered the shiny leather books in the room with the horsehair sofa where I could look but never touch and the tapestry on the wall above of some place far far away after Papa died I’d go into that room lie down on the floor and dream of myself on the desert of the tapestry PMS.. 25 now I imagined its secrets were hidden in those books and read ravenously one day Jennie suggested that I should think about college maybe Xavier where she had attended the sliver of light between the sliding doors blinked for a moment

“not me” I said and held up my hand two shades darker than hers two shades darker than a paper bag “there are other schools” she said

I thought of the stretch of desert on the tapestry and crossed my fingers

“life is hard” Jennie said “you’ve got to make yourself presentable” I was sitting on her bed watching her dress for work a new job where she said she had to look healthy if she wanted to keep from getting fired in case her sickness returned we didn’t know then she’d last another 50 years she pointed to her stockings I lifted the flimsy things while she struggled with the last few inches of a Playtex girdle encasing her like a sausage the closest I came to my mother’s underwear

26 PMS.. was looking at the pink rubber douche bag hanging on the bathroom door I was 90 pounds fully clothed and soaking wet but Claudia wanted me to wear a girdle I saw where the latex pinched Jennie’s flesh as she snapped her stockings in place

“there” she said and turned around her pleated skirt brushing against her calves like static

Aunt Jennie was a clothes horse from head to toe the sad little clothes I cut for paper dolls when I was in grammar school gathered dust in a shoe box at my mother’s house at Jennie’s I had the real thing and the best model to show off satins and velvets and real suede shoes with slanted heels sometimes worn for no occasion at all except she liked the feel of them that day once we had a family bar-b-que in the back yard two pits that Uncle Philip and my father manned like admirals in the thick of it Jennie wore a satin pants suit “Joan Crawford,”

PMS.. 27 she said and rushed from smoke that blew her way I had helped her dress that morning watched her wrap her hair in a wire rat neat as pie crust at the nape of her neck the day before she had lost her job “politics” she said and gave me the glad eye then danced with Uncle Philip as if she had all the riches in the world

28 PMS.. Colleen J. McElroy

Learning to Love Bessie Smith took years by all accounts cause who could love a whiskey voice lamenting some no-good man and Aunt Claudia hissing yes like an untethered balloon when Sweet her daughter said plenty do my mother wouldn’t even entertain the possibility given how she had no call to trust any man aiming to separate her from the family and I just flat out couldn’t understand what all that weeping was about while I tried sneaking another cherry spiked drink tried listening as Aunt Jennie said baby, men are like busses another will come along by and by she was a little tipsy but filled everyone’s cup until the punch bowl was empty and my mother ate all the fruit because she didn’t drink when for a time she was single again waiting by the side of the road

PMS.. 29 Jude Deason

Great Aunt Mona was like the old tractor in the barn. Her engine combusted each morning and she laughed at her own pumped gas before she turned serious again. She let curse words fly too, but not her hair. She kept those gray waves stacked upon each other close in and quiet. They were the only sea we knew where the black dirt grew into rows of yellow corn, where chickens ran headless, the cleaver in Mona’s hand. Truth be told, she scared the Midwest shit out of me. And Mona liked shit. She liked the smell of it spread on the fields. When she finally moved into town, she told me it was what she missed the most.

30 PMS.. Gail White

Dame Edith Sitwell

When you’re this ugly—not just plain, But pigface ugly—soon your brain Suggests that, like a circus clown, You play it up instead of down.

Hence all that Byzantine brocade, The turbans piled like marmalade On toast, and on one finger’s peg A topaz like a robin’s egg.

I clung to fame like grasping Death, Wrote poetry and played Macbeth. I and my brothers read Facade And thought ourselves as grand as God.

Though no one’s mother, no one’s wife, I made myself a charming life, Regretting only—now and then— My utter lack of charm for men.

PMS.. 31 Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

Euphemism

Trichotillomania (n): a compulsive desire to pull out one’s hair —OED

Picking, we called it, as if her black tangle was an orchard to harvest using Mom’s tweezers.

I never saw her do it, just the chicken-skin aftermath to sheathe beneath the butterfly scarf. I helped knot the back, admonished but ate only Cheerios,

O by O. Dad smoked his fingers nubs.

The dog’s tail: gnawed and bloodied.

32 PMS.. 2.

Blue-to-blue— hops my son en route to the bathroom— blue-to-blue-to-blue tile (grey are hot lava, turn us ghost-es).

He must know: Do fish like to be eaten?

Does the black fried worm have feelings?

PMS.. 33 Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

The Bathroom

Our products were aligned by rank; passion fruit and pinkish they committed to exfoliate us— peel, pop, scrub, and squelch.

I was careful to apply my Jean Naté tonic with a cotton ball even though it burned.

And we all declared the revolting black strands spaghetti-stuck to the sides of the sink or tumbleweeds in the corner to be the dog’s.

34 PMS.. Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

Waiting for Another Call from My Sister in the Middle of the Night

Curtain moonlight muscles through the trance I’m trying busting lambs and fences.

Your words last night were wordless, all crescendo issued for some lonesome air defense. I tried to be a stewardess: Something I can help with? Then just started counting the stuck kicks of grandmother’s watch as you bawled. That lunatic dog is still going on and on about it.

Chardonnay and Raisin Bran was dinner. Hunger bores a supernova, leaves its dense core. Bring you here.

PMS.. 35 Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

Back to Jackson

—for my sister

Last night we drank like loggers and you won the Beat It dance-off glorifying your third farewell this week. I watched the disco ball divide you into pocket-sized orbs, tried to catch and tuck them away. Didn’t work. Love that cowgirl shirt. Pearlescent buttons of stars traced our zigzag home tailed by the neighbor’s dinging cat. You’re heading back to Jackson for another unfit boy. By the door your dropped hoop blings a hole.

But this special hand-sewn pillow, of perfect weight and softness, because my neck gets gnarled with poems, you left on purpose.

36 PMS.. Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

Before The Birth of Venus

Who doesn’t know her molten spill, the hot locks

Zephyrus blew into style perpetual, the graceful fistful of split-ends that hide the beauty’s newly-wooled pudenda?

But figure all those floating years before the shell ship wrecked her lazing in the tonsured sunset of a cup, drifting just to drift on green swirling maybe letting her lids seal fractals, fingers dip and groove that wet salt feeling for smooches of the curious cloud-strokes—vital, raw, briny— divulged entirely.

PMS.. 37 Samantha Pious

Le Violon

Le Musicien mire un visage hagard Et des yeux d’où l’éclair des triomphes s’envole. Le soir tombe, apportant une fatigue molle, Et le vieil homme dit: Il se fait déjà tard.

L’amant peut oublier le plus divin regard Et le son de la plus enivrante parole, Mais rien ne peut guérir, rien jamais ne console L’artiste défaillant de la mort de son art.

Le violon se tait. Comme par ironie, L’immortel instrument garde son harmonie Et, matière, a vaincu l’esprit humilié.

Il attend un Élu, qui, dans un prochain âge, Viendra, sans plus songer au vieux Maître oublié, Recueillir largement le divin héritage.

—Renée Vivien

rediscovered by Jean-Paul Goujon (1986)

Renée Vivien (née Pauline Mary Tarn, 1877-1909) was a lesbian writer who made her home in Paris during the Belle Époque. In 1903, she cou- rageously “came out” by publishing a volume of adaptations from the Ancient Greek poetry of Sappho under the feminine form of her chosen name. Rewarded with public ostracization, she continued to publish her work until her death six years later of consumption, at age thirty-two.

38 PMS.. Samantha Pious

The Violin

The great Musician bears a haggard face And eyes whence the triumphant light has fled. Night falls, bringing gentle drowsiness, And the old man says: It is already late.

The magic gaze may leave the lover’s heart, The most intoxicating words may go, But nothing cures, nothing can console The artist for the dying of his art.

The violin is still. As though in irony, The instrument conserves its harmony And, soulless, vanquishes the humbled soul.

It’s waiting for the One who, in a future time, Shall come, undreaming of the Master old, To harvest from the heritage divine.

—Renée Vivien

rediscovered by Jean-Paul Goujon (1986)

PMS.. 39 Samantha Pious

Sur la Place Publique

Les nuages flottants déroulaient leur écharpe Dans le ciel pur, de la couleur des fleurs de lin. J’étais fervente et jeune et j’avais une harpe. Le monde se paraît, suave et féminin.

Dans la forêt, des gris violets d’amarante Réjouissaient mes yeux larges ouverts. J’entendais Rire en moi, comme au fond d’un passé, l’âme errante Et le coeur musical des pâtres irlandais.

La sève m’emplissait d’une multiple ivresse Et je buvais ce vin merveilleux, à longs traits. Ainsi j’errais, portant ma harpe et sa promesse, Et je ne savais pas quel trésor je portais.

Un matin, je suivis des hommes et des femmes Qui marchaient vers la ville aux toits bleus. J’ai quitté Pour les suivre les bois pleins d’ombres et de flammes Et j’ai porté ma harpe à travers la cité.

Puis, j’ai chanté debout sur la place publique D’où montait une odeur de poisson desséché, Mais, dans l’enivrement de ma propre musique, Je ne percevais point la rumeur du marché.

Car je me souvenais que les arbres très sages M’avaient parlé, dans le silence des grands bois. À mon entour sifflaient les âpres marchandages Mêlés aux quolibets des compères sournois.

40 PMS.. Dans la foule criant son aigre convoitise Une femme me vit et me tendit la main, Mais, emportée ailleurs par l’appel d’une brise, Celle-là disparut au tournant du chemin.

Je chantais franchement: ainsi chantent les pâtres. Autour de moi, le bruit de la vile cessait, Et, comme le couchant jetait ses lueurs d’âtres, Je vis que j’étais seule et que le jour baissait.

Je me mis à chanter sans témoins, pour la joie De chanter, comme on fait lorsque l’amour vous fuit, Lorsque l’espoir vous raille et que l’oubli vous broie. La harpe se brisa sous mes mains, dans la nuit.

—Renée Vivien

À l’heure des Mains jointes, 1906

PMS.. 41 Samantha Pious

Above the Public Place

The drifting clouds unfurled in the pure sky As though a scarf the soft gray-blue of linen. I was young and fervent, and I had a harp. The world appeared to me, soft and feminine.

In the woods, gray amaranthine violets Made my wide eyes rejoice. The laugh Of Irish shepherds’ wandering hearts and souls Welled up within me, from the distant past.

The tree-sap filled me with many a drunkenness, And I drank up that marvelous wine, uncaring. I wandered with my harp and its great promise And knew not what a treasure I was bearing.

One day, I followed the women and the men Toward the blue-roofed city. I went down, From dark and fiery woods, to follow them, And I bore my harp all through the town.

And then I sang above the public place From which a stench of rotten fish was stirring, But, intoxicated with my music’s sound, I did not hear the market’s murmuring.

For I remembered all that the wise trees Had told me, in the silence of the woods. All around, the catcalls and the whistles Mingled with the hawking of their goods.

42 PMS.. A woman saw me, offered me her hand In the mob shrieking out its greed and wrath, But, borne away by the summons of a breeze, She disappeared at the turning of the path.

I sang sincerely: so all shepherds sing. All around, the vile noise was waning, And, as the sunset cast its firelight, I saw I was alone and day was fading.

I sang without a witness, for the joy Of singing, as one does when love takes flight, When hope mocks, when oblivion destroys. The harp broke under my hands, in the night.

At the Hour of Hand in Hand, 1906

PMS.. 43 M. L. Brown

Running

The way algae slipped into moss—

the first stitch on earth

rhizoids running along rocks, through bogs. It’s a lie

that moss hems only the north side

of trees. Moss knots anywhere,

without roots, without seeds.

When the sun runs too hot

moss can almost stop, wait

for water. We could not.

44 PMS.. M. L. Brown

Synonym for Lichen

A slow body both partners

tightly bound to rock or leafy with loose attachments.

Lichen loves old stones, fills in willow, memento mori—

Origin: Latin, from Greek: to lick.

If caribou eat it, why not men?

PMS.. 45 ** in sparse

North a simple

two

There is no synonym for lichen except slow growth, except coupling— you trap me, I feed you.

46 PMS.. Kate Daniels

Reading a Biography of Thomas Jefferson in the Months of My Son’s Recovery

Because he bought the great swath of mucky swamp And marshy wetland on the southern edge of the territory, Then let it alone, so it could fulminate, over time Into its queer and patchwork, private self—

Because he forged a plowshare from paranoia About the motivations of Napoleon, declined to incite A war, and approved, instead, a purchase order—

Because he would have settled for New Orleans, but acquired The whole thing anyway, through perseverance and hard Bargaining, and not being too close with the government’s money—

Because he bought it all. Half a million acres. Sight unseen—

Because he loved great silences, and alligators, and bustling ports, And unfettered access to commerce, and international Trade, and bowery, stone-paved courtyards, noisy With clattering palms, and formal drawing rooms Cooled with high ceilings and shuttered windows, furnished In the lush, upholstered styles of Louis Quinze. Because he valued Imported wines and dark, brewed coffees, and had a tongue That understood those subtle differences, but still found himself Thrilled as a child by the strange, uncatalogued creatures that crawled And swam and winged themselves throughout the native Territory—

PMS.. 47 Because of all this, I return thanks to Thomas Jefferson For his flawed example of human greatness, for the mind-boggling Diversity of Louisiana—birthplace of my second son, 13th of December 1990, the largest child delivered to the state that day…

* Can’t help drawing back at how he lived in two minds Because he was of two minds like a person With old time manic depression: the slaveholder And the Democrat, the tranquil hilltop of Monticello, And the ringing cobblestones of Paris, France. The white Wife, and the black slave mistress…

* Before he was my son, he was contained Within a clutch of dangling eggs that waited, All atremble, for his father’s transforming glob Of universal glue.

From the beginning—before The beginning—before he had arranged Himself into a fetal entity, and begun To grow inside me, he was endangered By the mind-breaking molecules our ancestors Hoarded, and passed forward in a blameless Game of chance, shuffling the genes.

Even then, two minds circulated inside him, Tantalizing its brand new victim with generations Of charged-up narratives of drugs and drink, Of suicide and mania, of melancholic unmodulated Moods, bedeviling distant aunts who died early, And wild cousins who loved their night drives On dark roads with no headlights on, speedometer Straining to the arc of its limit, mothers who danced On the dining room table, kicking aside the Thanksgiving

48 PMS.. Turkey they had carefully basted hours before. We marveled at him in his bassinette—such An unsoothable infant, so unreconciled to breathing Oxygen, wearing a diaper, waiting for milk. Still small and manageable at first. But whirling Moods, baby-sized, and effervescent As the liminal clouds of early spring, stalked him Even then. Even then This Thing stalked him Threatening his freedom And his right to self-rule.

* We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Before we were Ourselves he knew us. Explained us To ourselves. Gave us a language whereby We understood the restless grandiosities of our forebears, And set us off on our well-trod path of personal Liberty and greedy freedom-seeking. Minted the metaphors We go on living by and misinterpreting, and clobbering Over the heads of the rest of the world—Still, His language stirs me up. Still, I believe He was a great man, and seek in the painful Contradictions of his personal life and public Service, ongoing signs for how to live In this strange era.

* Sometimes it helps to latch on To someone else’s vision In a crisis—the way I did At Monticello, so long ago,

PMS.. 49 Stumbling along the rain-slicked Bricks of orderly paths. Working class girl In cheap shoes and plastic glasses, Bad teeth. Terrified by the new world Of the mind I’d entered. From the strict Arrangements and smoothed out edges Of all those interwoven pavers someone baked From clay, carted there, laid out by hand, Brick by brick by brick, I carved a small sanity Where I could rest. And read.

* I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves. And if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education…

Once more, we drive our son to the treatment center, And sign him in, and watch him stripped of identity And privacy. Shoelaces and cigarettes. Cell phone. A dog-eared novel by Cormac McCarthy. A plastic bag Stuffed with things we take away with us, and weep over, Driving home. He has lost the safe depository of himself. Is dispossessed. Is lacking any wholesome discretion On his own behalf. Indicted by genetics, disempowered By blood, how should we school him, except by love And psychotropic medications?

* In the long nights when I can’t sleep, When anxiety courses through my body, Racheting up to a stiff rod of fear and dread I feel impaled upon, I sometimes let my mind Drift to Thomas Jefferson and his famous Inconsistencies… Here he is

50 PMS.. Tranquilly trotting through the bracing sunlight Of national history, all long bones and red hair, The eloquent incitements of his discourse scrolling Out the documents that determined our fate. But there he is at night, other mind in ascendance, Tying shut the bed curtains of a lover he inventoried Among his personal property. With whom he made Six children. Though he owned her. And then owned them. His own sons And Daughters…

The way that two things can coexist without Cancelling each other out—how did he live Like that? How does my own son live like that? As a schoolchild longs for certainty, I crave An answer, and sometimes hold my two hands up To weigh the yes against the no, slavery In one hand, freedom in the other: a tiny exercise In bipolarity that never helps.

* I cannot live without books, he wrote. And so gave permission for a kind of life Previously unimaginable: this life I live now— Soothing myself among my many volumes…

Forthcoming in Writing Monticello: 50 Contemporary Poets on Jefferson and His House on the Mountain, edited by Lisa Russ Spaar (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016).

PMS.. 51 Mary Ruefle

South on Seven

Whenever I drive a straight road I think of a straight pin, whenever I see a straight pin I think of a thousand angels, whenever I see a thousand angels I think of those who saw me through my longest night, when I was but a shadow of my future self. Depressed people are unattractive, but in the way donuts are evil. And so the eggs of tragedy are laid in the wrong place. As Hen may be in no way nuts about me, I will love the many sproutings of spring, those that flower and later lengthen till laid flat by the wind. I will walk in the corn maze where no one can smell me, I will lay my head where none can think of it, I will hide in the straw until all things understand reality is complete at every minute, even if buried, and long live the dying.

52 PMS.. Mary Ruefle

Jean

I heard the owl last night— I thought you were calling me from out of my sleep to come play in the dream of dreams. No one reads poetry. Until they die, and then no one understands it. We picnicked over this. At the mouth of the waterfall we opened our baskets and looked at the plants inside. Soon you had a leaf in your teeth and said to me so what?

PMS.. 53 Mary Ruefle

The Failure of Poetry

The failure of poetry is strange, a lonebroken place where each piece of mirror still retains the deep blue lake of time, where the women’s dresses are so soaked you can still see through them, and further still through the breasts to the pulp, the stalks of mullein are taller than a man, taller than his penis, which he is still in competition with, and the berries are beyond the touch of the dead but still ripe for the picking— Wake up, Rip, and tell Van Winkle the news: there is no future but the sky needs feeding, it’s thirsty as a plum tree. It’s twilight in the Catskills, there’s a tiresome little feeling in one corner of the brain and far far away, on Mars perhaps or in June, the settlers are settling for more or less the same.

54 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

Melissa Crowe

Caro Nome

I am an intellectual. I take words and the truth to be of value. —Simone de Beauvior

I fantasize renaming myself, and this isn’t because I don’t like Melissa. Melissa is a fine, sensible name with decent music, not villainous or silly. If you open the picnic basket to a surprise sandwich, when you unfold the waxed-paper, Melissa isn’t liverwurst, but neither is it artichoke hearts and sun dried tomato on a crusty baguette. Melissa is a cheese sandwich, with yellow mustard, on white. I’m not delighted to have been named thusly, but I am relieved not to have been named Mildred or Star. I would rename myself, though, with the same joy, the same sense of power with which I might change the word for sofa or slotted spoon or meringue. For a moment, these things might be transformed by sound, their old skin of sense peeled away to reveal their elemental nature before I slid the new name on like a slipcover. And who knows, who knows, maybe they’d be changed forever—if feather became rock, might it seem more solid somehow? Might it fall faster? I want to know—who might have loved me with another name? To my husband, would I smell as sweet? And this—not just what’s in a name, but what’s in a head of brown curls, a dog tooth that slightly overlaps its neighbor, a pale pink nipple, upturned? What about me—if not my name—is essential? If some great shock, some cataclysm, some shrewd spell separates me from myself, how am I to find my way back? By what gesture, what fingerprint will I remember which of these bodies is mine?

The body does not have a ‘truth’ or a ‘true nature’ since it is a process and its meaning and capacities will vary according to its context. —Moira Gatens

PMS.. 57 Crowe

I saw a couple from my car—still yards away from where they walked on the side of the road, shaded by massive oaks—who looked like two old ladies, sisters maybe, dear friends or lovers, but as I neared I could see that the smaller hunched one was much older than the one whose arm she held, and the one who held her aloft not elderly, though much older than me. Clearly they were mother and daughter, the difference between them grown slighter, both women with white hair, elastic-waist pants, good brown shoes. Once that little old lady pushed that other old lady in a pram, held the back of her daughter’s bicycle, both their black ponytails streaming. Once that old lady contained that other lady, held her ham- mocked below her heart like a secret wish. Now they inched along in the leafy gutter, clutching one another, balance one more thing they stood to lose. And I wondered, when they reach home, when one stands at the bathroom sink staring into the mirror at the bags under her eyes and the dark patches on her cheeks and one sits in the tub staring at her saggy knees, will she think Whose are these? When the names they’ve called each other slip their minds and when even their bodies fail to signify, who might they be?

The attempt to fix meaning is always in part doomed to failure, for it is the nature of meaning to be always already somewhere else... This is not to say that we could or should avoid meaning—simply that it is a more slippery business than it seems... —Toril Moi

At night, I lie in bed with my husband and our Annabelle—the girl we named and who insists every day on a new name, that we call her Mrs. Banks, Rapunzel, Cynthia. She doesn’t know herself, and like me, she hopes the words will help her get it right, that some alchemy of sound and thing will make her a real girl. Perhaps she thinks the word will bring the thing, the self she will recognize as her own—abracadabra—the way she says milk, then tastes it. I’ve read Lacan, de Saussure—I know language is a system of deferral, that we may speak and speak and never conjure, only elegize the thing we want. But I’m not telling Annabelle— or Cynthia. Let her believe the word might slide down the chimney in its heavy boots, leave a shiny package she will wake at dawn to open, and

58 PMS.. poemmemoirstory in it the skin she wishes to wear. Let her believe, for now at least, that no matter how threadbare, how ragged it may become, she will know it is her own, it is her. Let her call herself Clever, or Wendy, or Jane, whatever name, till she gets it right, and let her tell it to me. I see her—a three- year-old girl—asleep in the place where I once nursed the baby, and the ghost of another mouth withdraws. Hair covers the bulb of her skull. The dark darkens. As even this girl slips, ghostly, from the bed, I can do nothing to halt her. I know not what to call her, and she’s gone for good.

PMS.. 59 Mollie Hawkins

On Weddings

I am the Diane Arbus of the wedding photography circuit. Only not dead, or famous, or rich, or married to that psychiatrist guy from MASH, and my family never owned a fur coat store in New York. But the photography part is strikingly similar; I enjoy taking black and white pictures of people being average. Here’s a black and white photo of a bride with lipstick on her teeth. There’s a photo of a groom peeing on a tree because he is drunk and can’t find the bathroom. And right here, a bridesmaid putting a Band-Aid on her pinky toe because her stiletto rubbed it raw. I don’t know that Diane Arbus ever cared about the people in her portraits—a popular theory is that she exploited them—but I do know that I have unwavering apathy towards the subjects of mine. Let’s get this out of the way: I hate weddings. I really do. I dislike the frenzy, the churches, the smell of spray tans, the waiting around for the ceremony, the waiting around for the reception, the waiting around for “before” pictures and “after” pictures and “leaving in a spray of sparklers” pictures. I hate the ritual of it: the calculated and practiced dialogues spoken in front of people that would rather be at home watching Netflix or hanging out with their cats, because who really cares about your undying love to whomever? No one. Except—maybe—your parents. Half the time, the couples file for divorce before they even get their wedding albums back. Maybe I’m just bitter. I am, after all, unmarried and in my late twenties, and I spent over a decade assisting a wedding photographer (Dad). I am okay with this, for now. I don’t own any cats (one dog), and I really enjoy having leftovers in my fridge from the meals I cook that are designed for at least two. Still, I have to wonder why I have this sour taste in my mouth for weddings. I don’t care that most of my friends are married. They do okay. They invite me to dinner parties and we share and I’m extremely happy that I do not have any children. But when I get an invitation to a wedding, my chest gets that shriveled-up feeling.

60 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

Here is my earliest memory of a wedding. I am eight years old. The wedding has been cancelled. I’m standing at the bottom of thickly carpeted red stairs in a church foyer. I’m watching irritated florists carry ferns and plastic platforms through the front doors of the church and then back into the white Pell City Florist van. I’m wearing a Sunday dress on a Saturday, and I want desperately not to be. I constantly tug at the back of it, the horrible white and pink lace scratching my palms, because I live in constant fear that it will be tucked into my underwear. See, my mother’s voice will follow me to every bathroom I will ever enter, until I die, shaking her finger at me and telling me how idiotic I would look showing the world my underwear. “You would look like an idiot,” she’d say, “you don’t want the world seeing your business do you? No one wants to see that, fix your dress,” her face twisted and stern. I am a very nervous eight-year-old, and my dress staying in the downright position is as important as getting voted homecoming queen of my third grade class. There will be no wedding, and all I can think about is the food in the basement of the church, steaming away inside chrome serving dishes, with fat drops of condensation racing to a white tablecloth monogrammed with the initials “LGR.” My eight-year-old brain wonders: will they get a refund on all that monogrammed stuff? The bride’s name is Renee. She is the preacher’s daughter. I see her in flashes: blonde hair perfectly in place but mascara and eyeliner black around her eyes. She has just been dumped for another woman. I’m here because my parents work for this church, both as teachers for the attached K-12 private school where my sister and I attend. Later in life I will think only of this church/school as a brainwashing scam used to fund the preacher’s mansion on the lake. Anyway, I’m eight years old and I don’t understand the implications of losing someone. I find my mother buzzing around the sanctuary, helping take down flowers and unity candles. “What’s happened to the wedding?” I ask loudly. “When’s the reception?” All I care about is the food. I really just want some meatballs on toothpicks and some cake, and some of that fruit punch with all the sugar. “Hush,” my mother hisses at me, her pursed lips a warning. She looks around the sanctuary to make sure my voice doesn’t carry to the bride, who is wandering around, trying to find the number of her stylist. She has to tell her to take the day off.

PMS.. 61 Hawkins

My cheeks turn red. I am suddenly embarrassed for myself, and my constant craving for rich foods, but I am always just so hungry and so bored. As it was, I was tempting the limits of the zipper in my dress. I didn’t care that I was fat, not yet, but it was in the mail. After a few hours, all that’s left of the would-be wedding is a garish and grotesque white blob of a centerpiece that will sit on our family table until the white rose petals dry up and drift onto my dinner plate. “They were such great centerpieces,” my mother says with a touch of sadness. “It’s such a shame.” * Seventeen years later, I am standing in nylons and a blue pencil skirt inside the chapel of a church in Birmingham that I don’t remember the name of, a Nikon D40 hanging heavy around my neck, digging red lines into my skin. I’m being paid $200 to take pictures as the “second shooter” for my dad’s wedding photography business. I’ve helped my dad shoot weddings since I was 15. At first I really, really tried to capture the great moments. The smile as the groom waited for his bride to walk down the aisle. The glisten of the knife as it sliced through the silky white cake for the first time, abstracting it onto the plate like a tooth. Then the laughter, the dancing, the merriment. Then I realized: that’s what my dad was taking pictures of. He didn’t need double photographs of “the great moments,” so I started focusing on everything else. Here, a group of grandmas shoveling cake into their lipstick-smeared mouths. There, kids crying on pews with their tiny suits ruffled and untucked. This is wedding number 176, or 200, or 237. I’ve lost count. Bride number three-hundred-whatever is crying into her embroidered handkerchief monogrammed with the initials “CHB.” I hate monograms. “I never thought this day would come,” Bride number whatever tells me as I adjust the veil around the black curls cemented to her scalp. I resent my dad for making me adjust veils and fluff out dresses and hunt down the ever-scattered, ever-drunk wedding party. “Am I making my mascara run? Does it look okay?” She stares at me underneath pounds of concealer and eyeshadow. “You look just fine,” I say, and step back to take a candid photo as she blows happy snot into her handkerchief before wrapping it around the multicolored bouquet, thick as a tree trunk. What I really want to say

62 PMS.. poemmemoirstory is, You look fantastically mediocre, I really just want to eat the food you catered. But I don’t. I smile instead. I use the flash more than necessary. During the reception, the bride leans over to kiss her groom in a pose, and I am squatting behind them holding a trigger flash. My dad swears by this technique. I hate it because it bruises my knees. She whis- pers dreamily to her groom, “Aren’t you glad we finally did this?” and he shrugs. My dad does not hate weddings, and he is either a saint or a moron. He quit teaching when I was in middle school and started photograph- ing them full-time. He was really good at it; he won national awards and international awards, Kodak awards and Fuji awards. He gets excited about splashes of color on bridesmaids’ dresses and the way the light falls over someone’s hair. He loves the way people laugh and dance and celebrate. He doesn’t get tired of the same stupid songs, or the boring rituals, and he uses terms of endearment like Bee-yew-tee-mus! or Now we’re cooking with Crisco! when he gets particularly great shots. He floats around on a cloud of joy while I sit in a pew and wait for flower girls to start crying or pick their nose. That shit is worth remembering.

PMS.. 63 Sharanna Polk

Forever Flint

People ask me about the boys in Flint. They wonder if they’re malicious, ruthless, and vengeful. It is hard to explain that these boys are charismat- ic, easy going, and approachable. It is difficult to explain that, for a black girl, these are the kind of boys you fall in love with because they’re in your proximity. You grew up with them, you know them, and they have never been cruel to you. When stranded, it has been these boys who’ve provided transportation, and, when threatened, it is their phones you’ve called. Their faces have been the equivalent of home and familiarity, comfort and security. You don’t say cliché things like they’ve just been dropped into the wrong spaces, and you don’t dare mention that the skin they’re in just isn’t the right color for America sometimes. It’s hard to summarize hope- lessness and joblessness, paired with poverty. You don’t explain these kinds of things, because you don’t know how, so instead you reply, “No, they’re regular.”

Death “Quan died.” Tangy’s voice on the phone is girly: light, contemplative, soft. Hours before, a different voice on the telephone had told me that somebody had been shot at the Body Shop, the city’s most popular strip club at the time. They think it may have been Quan. Then Bararkas called back saying that it was Quan, but he was at the hospital on life support and he might make it. “That’s fucked up,” Tangy said. “If I had been in that club, I would have been shot too.” I can visualize her arm wrapped around Quan’s neck, mimicking lyrics to rap songs, smiling, jumping up and down. She and I are one in the same and so beside she and Quan, I also see myself with my neck buried in his huge arm. This isn’t the first boy she’s loved and lost. When Marquan called in 2007, asking her to come out with him, she

64 PMS.. poemmemoirstory couldn’t come up with a lie to tell her mother, and so she cut her phone off. The next morning his body was found on a street corner. “I’ll call you back.” I hang up and call Emery. “Hello?” His voice is upbeat, cheery, and expectant. “Quan gone.” “Gone where?” “Like, gone.” I feel my throat clogging. I feel like he’s going to force me to say it. “But gone where?” Silence. “Sharanna!” It comes out high pitched. “Where he gone to?” Then his voice breaks and he begins crying, “Where Quan gone to?” I hang up. 2010 was full of death. I didn’t want to talk about it because I didn’t know what to say, and, moreover, I didn’t know what to feel. I knew that there was something terribly wrong, but at 19 I was incapable of articulating it. When my brother called two days before Bararkas did, to tell me that they finally found Dominique in Forest Park, under melted snow and tires, I sat in the study room at Wayne State University and stared blankly at the walls. It won’t be until four years later that I find myself on the bathroom floor crying hysterically because it is 3 a.m., and the image of Dominique leaning into Tangy’s car window, smiling at me, won’t go away. That’s the last time I saw him. It was December, a month after Jamica and Rashawn were found murdered in their home. And so going into 2010 was already weighted, and confusing, feeling somehow stuffed. May would claim M.B., and in August, Eric would be shot on his birthday. Two years later, Mauricia will be found in the passenger seat of her car, parked outside of Hurley Medical Center’s Emergency entrance. It’ll only take two days for Kenyatta—last seen the day of Mauricia’s murder—to be found in a vacant lot. In November of 2012, Matt Wayne’s death would break the city’s record, set by the year which claimed Quan, Dominique, M.B. and Eric. Tangy would tell me years later, “Sometimes I wanna call Quan and tell him to come get me. Then I remember.”

PMS.. 65 Polk

I know that feeling. I know the heaviness of that remembering. And I know how crushing it can be—how you slowly suffocate, even if a moment earlier, you were breathing just fine.

Inner-City Woes Home Security Shield gave the title of Michigan’s worst city to Flint, and FBI statistics revealed the city to be 2012’s most dangerous in America— the same year that the city only employed 122 police officers. Business Insider’s “How Flint, Michigan Became the Most Dangerous City in America” attributes the violence to poverty, unemployment, and drugs. Ironically, photojournalist Brett Carlsen described the city as “caring,” saying that “the people of Flint actually give a shit about the people around them, which is refreshing.” Across the country, I found my city on top lists for the worst place to live; it was startling. In Alabama State University’s student media room, I glanced around to make sure nobody saw what I saw, and for some reason my heart was beating uncontrollably. I read what the articles said, and I didn’t believe them; for if the things they said were true, and I had really come from one of America’s worst cities, what else was out there? I had been happy, but now I felt fooled; I didn’t know if I could rely on these facts or my own memories. Although it seemed as if the violence was senseless, in my house, my father had said, “People ain’t just killin’ people for no reason. They killing the people they wanna kill.” Contrary to popular belief, you weren’t just getting shot for walking down the street; you were getting shot for walking down the street alone, after you’d shot at the shooter a week, even a month ago. You were getting murdered for partaking in a robbery with murderers who feared that you—after taking a victim to the hospital—would feel any droplet of remorse and go to the authorities. There was a girl at Alabama State from Flint, and she had turned up her nose at my friends and me. She had told a girl that she didn’t want people knowing she was from Flint because she hated how people from Flint acted: loud, bold and ignorant. I was confused; I had been raised to love my hometown and was even proud. But now, the computer screen becoming blurry, I understood her shame, even if I could not partake in it.

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That city had birthed me. Its streets and I had had plenty of love affairs, and it had even gone as far as to lick my wounds and stand me up straight when I felt my back bending. Of all the factors listed as contributing to the city’s violence, education was not one of them, despite the fact that schools are closing one after another—mostly in predominately black neighborhoods—leaving kids idle, stranded, and confused. In a city were turfs are determined by zoning laws of school districts, switching schools could be the equivalent of dropping out, since you’ll find yourself outside of the walls for fighting. When the city’s oldest high school—Central—closed, my brother was mandated to attend Northwestern, but he was from the wrong side of town. Eventually, he stopped going, unable to sit in a classroom and learn, while watching the hallways at the same time. Central students, known for their stubbornness, were also overly proud and resistant to claiming any building but their own, and so when they entered the halls of rivals, they were met with snickers and side jabs, jokes and a sense homelessness. Still, after being scattered throughout the city away from friends, they would not conform to another school’s pride. So, as fights between Central and Northwestern students broke out on one side of town, on another side the displaced kids were being tar- geted by Flint Northern students. The only other option would have been Southwestern, but my brother told me, “They only let the smart kids go to Southwestern.” “They didn’t want us in their schools. They was mad when the Central kids came,” he explained that Central’s closing hurt him. “It’s the only school I actually ever wanted to be at.” The only school to rival Central’s prideful stubbornness was Northern—my alma mater. In 2008, the city stopped sending school buses to my neighborhood because I did not live within my high school’s zone restrictions; I lived in Central’s zone. Because I was a gifted student, I was allowed to attend the school of my choice, but by my senior year, the Magnet program was cut because of a deficiency in funds—the exact reason they gave for closing a troubling number of schools. Superintendent Linda Thompson, who has said “no one is beating down the doors to buy or occupy” these schools failed to mention that there are no schools to occupy, with over 20 educational institutions closing.

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The city houses only two high schools, and after eight elementary school closings, only ten remain in a city that housed a population of over 100,000 in 2012. Although in 2014, the population fell below 100,000—for the first time since the 1920s. It is safe to say that the decrease in residents was a result of the school closings and not only the cause. Residents told MLive reporters that “closing buildings in neighborhoods already plagued by crime and foreclosures” would only add to their worries. Thompson explained that the buildings would eventually be demol- ished, “but there just isn’t any money for it in the current budget,” adding that, “For now, the district will secure the sites, maintain them and check on them regularly.” That was May 2013, and in December 2014, all of the schools were still standing: boarded up at first, then left wide open. I walked into the demolition of my own elementary school easily, and roamed the ruined hallways. I saw the Humpty Dumpty drawing on the old classroom wall, the office I’d been sent to for carrying a butter knife, the hallway I’d been forced to walk in a straight line. I walked into Ms. Jackson’s old English classroom, peered into Mrs. Rinoldo-Hopkin’s social studies class, and I felt my heart break. Thirty-one-year-old Roy Fields told MLive that the city has “left kids out here astray. They neglected our school system. Neglected our children. Neglected our people.”

The Facts She called my brother a nigger. She spit it at him. None of us—the children—knew how to take it, since both of her grandchildren were fathered by a black man, but even in elementary school, we knew it wasn’t a term of endearment. My daddy had not looked at us when he said, “Don’t go over there anymore,” and my mama had called her an “old white bitch.” She was Tre’s grandmother: aged, thin, and severely wrinkled with blotched skin. She had the nicest house on the block, with an above ground swimming pool in the backyard. She was stubborn and nosey and had cameras plastered around her house. She called the police a lot, once because I was breaking bricks in the street. I think the only reason

68 PMS.. poemmemoirstory she stayed in the neighborhood was because her house was paid off; she seemed to hate the neighborhood—she seemed to hate us. Homes in majority black neighborhoods do not appreciate as much as homes in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods. This appreciation gap begins whenever a neighborhood is more than 10% black, and it increas- es right along with the percentage of black homeowners. A 2001 Brookings Institution study showed that “wealthy minority neighborhoods had less home value per dollar of income than wealthy white neighborhoods.” The same study concluded that “poor white neighborhoods had more home value per income than poor minority neighborhoods.” Even if my neighborhood wasn’t in rapid decline, it is possible my baby brother would have still had “nigger” spit at him, and it’s possible that the individual doing the spitting would have been younger and less reluctant to leave their home. It is also possible that we would have been left in a majority black neighborhood, resulting in a decline of property value, leading to the neighborhood’s zoned schools receiving insufficient funding. When we moved to Hillcroft Drive, the streets were full and littered with people. The lawns had grass, and the houses were well-built. That was in the ’90s. Now, the empty spaces where houses used to be are over- whelming. Some homes stand, burnt, lopsided, and vandalized. Others just look sad, lonely, and defeated, but I remember when they were alive, and I was running in and out of their backdoors. I remember loitering on the corner with drug dealers, waiting for them to say they were hungry, because not only would they give gas money, they’d supply McDonald’s. And if it was going to be a long night, they’d lend out their fancy cars with the loud music. I remember not having to call anybody to see where they were because I already knew, and it was just a matter of waking up, getting dressed, and going outside. In 2009, the police security camera was set up outside of Tangy’s house, flashing its blue light on her bedroom window. It was intended to monitor crime, in what officials and residents called “one of the city’s worst neighborhoods”—my neighborhood. The camera was shot down twice, until finally, the city gave up restor- ing it. I remember encouraging the shooting down of the light, especially after it failed to see my best friend being stabbed in the middle of the street. I remember the skin of Tangy’s arm hanging, ripped apart by a

PMS.. 69 Polk blade in the hands of a girl whose name and description had been given, yet who had remained on the street, taunting us. Heather Ann Thompson writes that “de-industrialization and sub- urbanization surely did their part to erode our nation’s black and brown neighborhoods, but staggering rates of incarceration is what literally emptied them out,” going on to assert that “such concentrated levels of imprisonment have torn at the social fabric of inner city neighborhoods in ways that even people who live there find hard to comprehend, let alone outsiders.” Thompson sums up her argument by stating that “America’s poorest people of color had no seat at the policy table where mass incarceration was made.” Jason Riley wrote in The Washington Times that “the political left wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that lead people to view young black males with suspicion,” but failed to mention that young black males are viewed with suspicion even before they contributed to high crime rates. My oldest brother—brown, braided hair, grey shirt, blue jeans— hemmed up on a police car for “walking in the streets when a sidewalk was provided.” His eyes staring into mines, saying, “Go get Daddy!” I run home, yelling through the armor guarded door, “The police got C.P!” Daddy jumps up, slips his feet into house shoes, and we walk the two blocks. “What y’all arresting him for?” “We got a call about somebody shooting out here, sir.” The sir stung in my ears as the police told my daddy that my brother fit the description, although they’d given us a different reason. “What’s the description?” “He was wearing a grey shirt and he had braids, sir.” “Every damn body out here fit the fuckin’ description!” I don’t want my brother to fit a description. I don’t want to run home to seek protection from the police, yet I stand there, dumbfounded but proud. I have armor, even if it is only in the form of Daddy.

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Forever There are women whose children will not be coming home. There are friends that I will never ride in the car with again. There are boys I have loved, who became my brothers, who I will never again meet in the street for a fist fight nor call on the phone. They will never see me smack my grown-up lips or roll my wiser eyes. And all the while, life will keep moving and people will keep believing that things aren’t so bad. And in the midst of this pretend okay-ness, there is a city, longing for life support, losing its children in daylight, fearing that it may not make it through the night.

PMS.. 71 Zhanna Slor

What’s Five Feet in Front of You

“I don’t even like Whole Foods,” I told the cop as he and his partner escorted me out to his squad car, Milwaukee Police painted across it in black letters. “I never come here.” He laughed and said, “Well, now you never have to come back.” He was right. Legally I was no longer allowed in any Whole Foods. I had to sign a paper and everything. This didn’t exactly make me feel better, but maybe it meant they’d let me go home finally. It’d been hours since Giovani, a half-Cuban film student I was kind of seeing, had used my purse to steal various items of food and someone had not only noticed, but tried then failed to physically restrain him. It was more his bad luck than anything, as the store had recently hired an outsider to keep any eye out for this sort of thing. Apparently organic food store theft was a big problem in 2008—the year that brought us the iPhone, the Virginia Tech tragedy, and the long-awaited end of the Bush administration. It was also the end of my life in college, although to me, it felt like any other year. I still had no plans post-graduation, still thought the perfect adult life would just come to me magically, the way everything else seemed to come to me—boys, good grades, money. The cops opened the car door for me and my three large bags of groceries I’d now have to carry all the way home. I knew they had no grounds to arrest me, that they were more likely to drive me home than to jail, but still my heart raced as I sat behind their iron-gated heads. Inches of snow covered the ground, and more was falling down on top of it—snow on top of snow on top of snow. It swirled over the windshield, the alley, the dim orange streetlights. Winter that year was deep and unrelenting, an abyss of cold. It was as if the universe decided it needed to prepare me for what would come after my last semester. That for years, I’d be walking blindly ahead, the world so white and blank it was impossible to tell what was five feet in front of you. “I’ll ask you again,” said Mean Cop from the driver’s seat, interrupt- ing the nagging realization that not only would I have to walk two miles home with heavy bags of groceries, I would have to do it in a blizzard.

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I didn’t even have my keys with me, because Gio had taken my entire purse with him when he’d run out the door with who knows how much of stolen food in it, leaving me to clean up his mess. Couldn’t he have at least taken the groceries I paid for with him when he ran off? I thought. No, of course not. Then he wouldn’t be Gio—passionate, emotionally ambivalent, completely narcissistic. The combination of which was irre- sistible to me at the time, perhaps because it was such a distraction from a reality I was not ready to face. Mean Cop looked at me from the rearview mirror. “Look, you’re gonna be in big trouble if you don’t tell us. If we can’t catch this guy, this is all on you.” “What?” I asked, reflexively. There was no way that could be true. They didn’t even have my ID or address. “It will. And it’s a four-hundred-dollar fine,” he said. “You think this guy will give you a cent?” I didn’t respond. “So what was your boyfriend’s last name?” he said. “He’s NOT my boyfriend,” I said. “I hardly know him.” Technically, this was all true, but I did know his last name and even where he lived, since it happened to be on my couch. Mean Cop frowned again. He clearly didn’t believe me. “What are you doing with a guy like that?” asked Nice Cop, though it was more of a rhetorical question, as we’d already gone over all this in the back of Whole Foods, in the tiny fluorescent room I’d been sitting in for the last hour, kicking myself for not running off when I had the chance—for entire minutes everyone was focused on catching Gio before he left the vestibule and they couldn’t go after him. Whole Foods had a No-Chase policy. I shrugged and answered honestly, though my heart was beating fast. This was usually what happened to me under pressure: underneath, everything is racing; to the world, I am neutral. Calm, even. “I have bad taste in men,” I said. I saw Nice Cop smile from the corner of my eye, and Mean Cop looked at him with annoyance. They really should have been stars on a cliché police show. Inside, I’d learned that Nice Cop was only two weeks older than I was, a senior at Marquette studying Criminology and Law. We’d spent most of our time talking about college, not the careless thiev- ing of my bipolar pseudo-boyfriend, while Mean Cop shuffled about,

PMS.. 73 Slor calling off all the other squad cars that had arrived—at least five, because someone had mistakenly called it an armed robbery, when it was really just Gio with my purse. Probably all it had in there was a few blocks of cheese. I’d seen Gio get away with much worse. In Portland, where I’d visited him after only knowing him two weeks, he’d stolen six expensive bottles of wine at once, on top of an entire week’s worth of groceries in his backpack. Apparently this wasn’t even unusual in Portland, among their large and diverse twenty-something population, who somehow had an endless supply of American Spirits and tattoos and coffee, but not enough money for lunch. “The goal of my career,” Nice Cop had told me, “is to arrest someone for mashing.” “What is that?” I asked, spinning around in my chair. “Flirting with someone when they’re not interested.” “That’s illegal?” “Yep. Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine,” he said. “Wow,” I said, awestruck. I spun around some more. “Those are some lofty goals you have,” I added. Nice Cop shrugged. “Have you ever arrested someone you went to school with?” I asked. “Nah,” he said. “But I did arrest someone who was trying to burn down my school.” I paused, thinking. “Do you like being a cop?” I asked him, truly curious. I’d always liked cop shows, and had never developed the full ani- mosity towards them that all my friends had. “Twenty-three years and then a full pension,” he replied, making it even more clear that he wasn’t all that keen on his career. How could he be, at twenty-one? The future was the weekend, not your life. “Twenty-three years is a long time if you don’t like what you’re doing,” I said, trying to imagine having a job like that. Or any full-time job, really. I spun in my chair again. “Do you feel like you’re making a difference at least?” He shrugged. “I do…but not as much as I would like to. I think there’s something wrong in the system that stops real change from happening,” he said. “Not laziness or stupidity…but something down in the core.” “Yeah, there really is,” I agreed, though it was surprising to hear it from a cop. If I were anyone else, I might have been interested in him. He was cute, after all. Part of me hoped he’d even ask me out. But I’d never

74 PMS.. poemmemoirstory been attracted to an emotionally stable man in my life, and it didn’t seem likely I’d be starting anytime soon. If Gio were a cop, he’d be both the nice one and the mean one, depending on the day. I’d already counted up to six different Gios, and we’d only known each other half a year. Sometimes I wished I’d never been in Fuel Café that day we’d met the previous summer, his last in Milwaukee before returning to Portland to move out of his apartment and then briefly moving to Cambodia to make a film. I had no idea he’d end up moving to Milwaukee after all of that, that he wouldn’t be just some guy I had an intense two-day fling with. That I’d end up visiting him in Portland while he excitedly packed up all his things, that we’d stumble around in the pitch-black Oregon woods looking for Bagby Springs at five in the morning, ride bikes down to the harbor, meet Nirvana’s Chris Noveselic, wandering around downtown. That on the third day I’d twist my ankle trying to ride a skateboard, and meet the second of many Gios: the one who was selfish and put off by other’s physical ailments and believed bone fractures could be fabricated by your mind. Even though that’s when I should have lost interest, I didn’t. I didn’t lose interest even after we separated in Seattle, or after I was in Milwaukee again and he spent nearly every night in Cambodian internet cafés messaging me on MySpace or calling me at crazy hours. Or even after he moved to Milwaukee and began living on our couch, and would stop doing whatever he was doing every time my pretty roommate James walked into the house. I know what this sounds like—that he was using me. But in a way, we were using each other. I liked having him around. And deep down, I liked the drama too. Mean Cop returned then, gesturing for us to get up and follow him. After the brief interrogation in the car, they let me go, and I carried my groceries in my cold, wet hands all the way back to Riverwest, where Gio was standing on our porch smoking an American Spirit and not even wearing a coat. Snow drenched my Converse sneakers and jeans, and fell in mounds around the patio, past the dim orange lamp, over Gio’s relaxed posture. His perfectly curly blonde hair and goatee, his thick sturdy shoulders. As I got closer, I saw that he was smiling. “You think this is funny?” I asked, dropping the groceries by his feet. “Kinda,” he said, his whole body energized. My entire walk home I’d been picturing the best ways to murder him and get away with it, but suddenly, we were both bursting out in laughter.

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“Why didn’t you just run?” he asked me, when we were upstairs. I was so cold my teeth started chattering, and was wrapping a blanket around my wet shoulders. It was dark and all my roommates were gone, as it was still the tail end of winter break. I’d only just come back myself, from a free trip to Israel. I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I wanted to see what happened. Then it was too late.” “Did you see how there were four people grabbing me and I still got away?” “Yes, I noticed that,” I said, remembering the way the woman had held onto his leg while he sort of dragged her on the floor. The whole thing was kind of embarrassing, but I wasn’t even sure for whom. “I still don’t get how you got away.” Gio smiled again. “Because I’m just that awesome.” I suddenly felt like I understood the way Bonnie and Clyde must have felt after they’d gotten away with something, even if it was just some expensive organic food. If Gio hadn’t spent the last three months explaining to me over and over again that we were just going to be friends now, I would have probably started kissing him. Instead, I sat down and lit a cigarette. “You want to watch a movie?” he asked, pacing back and forth excitedly. This was manic Gio that I’d come home to—ecstatic, alert, wanting and wanting. Without hearing my response, he went to set up the DVD player. A month before he’d brought over his film projector and a screen so large it took up the entire wall. We’d been working our way through the first season of Rome that week. It was about all I could manage, as leaving the house had lately felt like an immense task. Either it was jet- lag or the unrelenting winter or even Gio’s energy—at moments bright and explosive, at others so dark and low it would suck in everything and everyone around. I’d experienced depressives before, but never someone who was bipolar and refused to take his meds. It was like being forced to go along on a constant roller coaster of emotion. “Aren’t you supposed to be moved out already?” I asked, suddenly annoyed again. We were always doing this, going back and forth with our unmet needs—I wanted him to admit we were dating, he wanted to be best friends but still be able to sleep with me whenever he wanted. Either that or he just didn’t know what he wanted—this was always a hard thing to know. One day you’d think you wanted one thing, the next you’d be

76 PMS.. poemmemoirstory sure it was something else entirely. Sometimes you’d even want multiple, irreconcilable things at once. We’d had a major argument about this right before I’d gone to Israel on Birthright earlier in the month and had decided the best thing for us would be for him to finally find his own apartment. He’d been crashing at our house for almost two months then, ever since he’d returned from Cambodia filming a documentary that was never even made. Although he’d sent me a very heated, final message saying he’d be out of the house when I got back, even if he had to live in his car, he was still there, days after my return, making me go on errands with him. Plus, the first thing we’d done after I’d walked in the door was have sex, which once again threw our entire relationship into a confusing, unsettled limbo. “I am moved out,” Gio said, still setting up the projector, in between his hyperactive pacing. I looked around, at all the obvious indications that this wasn’t true. His clothes were in every corner. His camera was under the kitchen table. His dog was on the rug. His robe was on the back of my door. He watched me and said, “I’ll go home after the movie.” “Fine,” I said, having nowhere else to be and no one else to be with. Plus, secretly I liked that he still had so many things left at my house because it meant that he’d have to come back. Even though I spent half our time together hating either him or myself, I was still convinced he’d wake up one day and realize that we were meant to be together. “Come here,” Gio said, patting the couch between him and the dog. He clicked play on the movie—Pirates of the Caribbean 3, possibly the worst movie ever made. I sat down, leaning into him, his smell. That was probably my favorite thing about him—about every man I’d been with— his smell. His shoulders, his arms. I’d done many things I regretted just for a smell and a pair of arms. “You know I’m not legally allowed in Whole Foods anymore?” I asked as the previews started rolling. “No shit?” Gio asked. He lit a cigarette. “Yeah. So now you really can’t make me go there with you anymore.” Gio shrugged, but he was smiling. “What did you get even?” I asked. “Mostly cheese. And some pasta. I was gonna make some for dinner but it took you so long to get home.”

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I shook my head, anger renewed. “Relax, relax,” he said. “It all worked out fine.” “For you maybe.” “You should have just left.” “I should have done a lot of things,” I said. He looked at me questioningly, and I suddenly felt sad. Sometimes I worried I was bipolar too, the way emotions were constantly overtaking me. One second I was accepting our complicated situation, the next I wanted to run into my room and close the door and cry. “What?” Gio asked. Gio was many things, many frustrating, duplici- tous things, but he was also incredibly sensitive to emotional shifts, probably because he experienced so many on a daily basis. He didn’t mind my anger, but the rare times I’d get that down he became very concerned. If he hadn’t, it probably would have been easier to leave him. I sighed, trying to find the words. “Sometimes you make me so sad I just don’t know what to do with it all,” I said. I was looking at the shaggy carpet on the floor, but I could feel him watching me. “That might be the most honest thing you ever said to me,” he said. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I tell you lots of things that are true.” “True maybe, but not honest,” he said. “I don’t think you’re all that honest with yourself either.” I moved away from him and edged closer to Buendia, the dog, and started petting her on the head. “Right, because you know me so well,” I said. “I think I do,” Gio said. “You’re not so mysterious.” This made me even angrier than the grocery store incident; there was almost nothing I hated more than men telling me they knew me. And he knew that. Gio, another switch going off on his head, grabbed my glasses then and put them on his face. He sat up straight and proper, his version of being more feminine. “I—I just don’t understand you,” he said in a high voice, clearly meaning to imitate mine. He put a hand on his forehead like he was going to faint. I crossed my arms. “Well, I don’t want you to understand me so everything I say to you is really vague,” I said.

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He laughed, manically. Buendia looked up momentarily as if something interesting might be happening, then put her head back down. I couldn’t help but smile. “You’re so serious all the time,” Gio said, giving me my glasses back. “Why can’t you just be?” I shrug. “I think I’m just always afraid of losing things,” I say. It was even more the case with him, as it just seemed inevitable. Plus, I wasn’t sure I ever had him at all, that I wasn’t just a placeholder for whoever he was waiting for. “You’re not gonna lose me,” he said, even though I was, as we spoke, losing him a little bit. Every moment of every day we are all losing something. “You don’t know that,” I said. I leaned back against the couch again. The DVD had been stuck on the opening page, waiting for someone to push Play. Gio grabbed the remote, but first he looked at me again. “Quit making problems out of nothing. Be happy when you can,” he said, switching into guru mode. He did this a lot too, even though he was only four years older than me. “You are where you are with who you are with.” “I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.” “Don’t try,” he said. “Do.” Then he put an arm around me and pressed Play.

PMS.. 79 Amy Bailey

Woman’s Body Found

Shanna and I tripped up the three stairs leading into my trailer and burst like firecrackers, loud and ricocheting, through the storm door. She immediately made her way to my grandma, who sat in her kitchen chair, and asked to see her hands. Shanna always had to see Gran’s hands. My grandma rested her lit Lucky Strike in the ashtray on the kitchen table and turned toward Shanna with hands outstretched, palms down. “Here you go,” she surrendered. “Mrs. Smith,” Shanna said, stumbling over the words with a five-year- old’s speech impediments, barely getting the sounds out into something close to right. “You have worms in your hands!” She giggled, her freckled cheeks scrunching into a grin and the blue ice of her eyes shining. My grandma smirked; it was always the same. “They’re not worms, silly, they’re just veins,” my grandma countered. But Shanna stared wide-eyed as my grandma teasingly took an index finger and pressed on the blue-purple veins on the back of her other hand, wiggling the “worms” under the delicate, tissue-paper skin. Shanna screeched with laughter standing there in her jelly sandals on the fake brick linoleum floor of the kitchen, the cigarette still burning in the ashtray. “Worms!” she cried and we crashed back through the front door out into the sunlight. I don’t know exactly what happened to Shanna. But I know she is dead. If the pictures of the two of us together as toddlers are any indica- tion, Shanna was my first friend. We’re in a leaf pile, the two of us. She’s in her pink coat. I am in my red coat. She’s lying in the leaves, and I am standing with a leaf in my tiny hand and the ear flaps of my white hat are tied in a bow under my chin. We were together in all that color of an Ohio fall, jumping into the leaves, rolling in them, stomping to hear their crunch, our mothers playfully covering us in them. Just babies, really, discovering and processing the world around us. Shanna died in (lucky number) 2013, all the way on the other side of the country, alone, without her sisters or her mother or her children nearby. I don’t know how she ended up in California. I only know she died there.

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Clover flowers often overtook the real grass in our front yard. We lived in a trailer park, after all, and there were no TruGreen trucks treat- ing these lawns. We were lucky to have grass at all. Honey bees were plentiful then, and summer was rife with buzzing as they would alight on the white flowers, no bigger than marbles, perched atop delicate green stems. Bees be damned, we’d run with bared feet anyway. Sprinklers, plastic kiddie pools, and Slip’n Slides kept us racing barefoot and half naked through the grass and bees and clover. Shanna ran, too, her pig- tails bouncing, all freckles and personality like Punky Brewster in a bath- ing suit. But that mid-summer afternoon she landed squarely on a honey bee gathering nectar on a clover flower, and he left the signature brown stinger in her big toe. Shanna, blinded by tears, collapsed to the ground holding her foot. My uncle was visiting that day, and, without hesitation, he scooped her up and returned to his seat in the old metal lawn chair, heaving Shanna onto his lap. With his pocketknife tweezers, he slid the delicate needle from under the skin of her toe like a surgeon. She always remembered him for that moment. Shanna and a boyfriend were arrested for possessing heroin, syringes, and other drug paraphernalia in the summer of 2013. In an online post, her sister claims Shanna had been sober from heroin for months before her death. But, yet, it was that same boyfriend she was with in California just before she died and heroin has the highest relapse rate of any drug at 87 percent. For some, heroin cravings last for years after treatment. No one said Shanna had actual treatment. We didn’t play at Shanna’s trailer often. It was smaller than most, cramped and old. She and her sisters slept all piled into one closet-like bedroom with bunk beds. Her stepdad usually roosted in the front room with a remote and a beer in hand while we walked past on eggshells. I wasn’t accustomed to dads, not having one myself, and Jim was harsh and demanding, altogether unfriendly. There were strict rules to be followed, often arbitrary and only known once they were barked, about when the girls could play, who they could play with, where they could go in the neighborhood, who could come inside with them, how long they could talk on the phone, and chores to be done. His body seemed to pulse with an underlying tension that he fed to anyone who entered the room. I couldn’t relax or have fun at Shanna’s. We preferred to play outside. Shanna went to kindergarten a year before I did. But I’d wait for her and the other older kids to get off the bus at the end of the day so we

PMS.. 81 Bailey could make a clubhouse in the back of my mom’s car or run around outside spying on the older boys in the neighborhood. At Christmas, my mom took the two of us to see Santa downtown. After a horse-drawn carriage ride through the city, we practically ran through Shillito’s department store to find the Santa line. The line itself, the waiting, was half the adventure. The queue snaked and bent through a North Pole won- derland, with elves in red pointy hats engaged in elfin duties in staged rooms along the route. Shanna and I, sweating in our winter coats, stood on tiptoes and pressed our noses to the glass to see Santa’s elves sorting overflowing bags of mail, painting toy trains, making candy canes, ice fishing, caring for reindeer. We dropped our own letters to Santa Claus in a mailbox in line, listing our wishes and desires, our dreams of fanci- ful toys that would likely never make it under our trailer-park trees. At last we arrived at Santa himself, his fake beard ruffled, his bright eyes and youthful face belying his costume. I don’t remember what we asked for, but our picture was quickly snapped by a woman in an elf costume. There Shanna and I sit, each on a knee, our bodies facing each other in our coats. Shanna beams her smile toward the camera, and I grin with the false, toothless smile my mom always despised. Santa grips my shoulder tightly with his young, dark-haired arm. I can’t see where he’s holding on to Shanna. A security guard found Shanna’s body slumped over a utility box in a darkened alleyway near a dumpster at 1 a.m. She had drugs in her pockets and she wasn’t breathing. Heroin relaxes the brain in the centers where breathing is regulated. Most overdoses happen because the body forgot to keep pulling air in and pushing air out. When we were six or seven, Shanna and I decided we needed to learn how to French kiss. But we didn’t understand what that meant or how it worked. We tucked ourselves into a corner of my bedroom out of the line of sight of my door, and we pressed our mouths together, wide open, and blew air until our cheeks puffed out. We fell into a fit of giggles, knowing we weren’t quite doing it right. A few years later Shanna told me she had seen her grown uncle in the bathroom. I do not know if she was spying or how she managed to see into the bathroom where he stood. “I don’t think he peed. He just stood over the toilet and white stuff came out of his wiener,” she whispered. I thought she was lying, and I told her so. She swore she was not. But I had never heard of anything like this before. White stuff? Not a chance; she must be crazy. Months later she told me she found something weird on her mom’s bed.

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“It was like a wiener on a stick. And it had stuff on it, like gooey.” “Nuh-uh, no such thing,” I told her. She promised it was right out there on her mom’s bed in the middle of the bedroom for all to see. By the time we were ten, Shanna and I were in fourth grade together. She’d been held back. We sat side-by-side on the school bus fairly often. “You don’t know what a rubber is?” she asked incredulously. No, I didn’t know what a rubber was, not in the context she was talking about. She explained rubbers, condoms as it were, and their use. I didn’t know where she was getting this knowledge. I knew what sex was, but not like this. During our fifth grade year, I sat on the bus next to Shanna, her brown hair now short and curled on top in a tight perm giving her a much more mature look, her breasts budding in a training bra. “I want to be a hooker when I grow up,” she confided with a smirk. “You’re crazy!” I scolded. “No one wants to be a hooker!” “I do!” she insisted. I just shook my head. I was 11. What could I have said? I didn’t have those kinds of words then. We would jump off the bus at our stop and hurry along home with all the other neighborhood kids. Shanna endlessly teased the older boys all the way. They endlessly teased her back. She’d call one boy “fish lips” for his oversized pucker. She called another, the one she liked the best, “dog face” to rile him up. Her insults bought reciprocated attention, the kind of attention from boys that seems safe and distant in its meanness. The kind of attention that says, “I see you, you annoying little bitch.” She didn’t know how to bring the boys closer to her, so she settled for their barbs and dismissiveness, because at least they had to acknowledge her. We all thought she was boy crazy. She wanted those boys, and maybe she knew how, and why, she wanted them long before any of us did. Shanna was arrested for prostitution in the spring of 2010. She was seen flagging down vehicles at an intersection in the middle of the afternoon until she got into a car with a man who drove her to an empty trailer in a nearby trailer park. The man, who was also issued a criminal citation for solicitation, paid her $20 upfront and was planning to pay her another $20 later. Heroin addicts tend to spend between $100 and $200 per day on drugs. In sixth grade, Shanna and her family moved to a house in another suburb. She changed schools, and soon she hosted a slumber party in the empty top-floor room of her new home. She invited me and two of the most popular girls in her new school. One girl had long, luscious wavy brown hair that cascaded down her back. The other girl was thin and

PMS.. 83 Bailey blonde. Both of them pretty, preppy girls who didn’t really know Shanna yet at all. They seemed older, wiser, more worldly than both of us put together. They had the latest clothes, coordinated pajamas, new sleeping bags. They were all delicate flowers and Laura Ashley ads, if Laura Ashley knew about the power of blow jobs and how to make another girl’s stomach knot up with one withering look of disgust. And worst of all they were a duo, a team. They could talk without speaking; they shared the same opinions about everything. Shanna and I had been apart for months, and our relationship wasn’t ever quite like that. It was a long, harrowing night of unknowingly acting out my part as the crude and immature trailer trash girl while watching Shanna suck up to these new girls in her life, pretending to be so grown up by talking about boys at school and agreeing with everything the girls said. Maybe I made Shanna look better. She had other friends, see? She was worthy of friendship. Or maybe I made Shanna look worse. Who is this horrible, gross girl who still thinks burps are funny? This is who she’s friends with? The original news reports of Shanna’s death state that officers on the scene thought she was a transient, a homeless person, alone. The headline read, “Woman’s Body Found.” After the slumber party, we mainly stayed in touch by writing letters, those kinds of letters that middle and junior high school girls write with big, loopy handwriting, bubbly and mindless. We strived for pretty even in our penmanship when we couldn’t make it happen on our faces. She invited me, by letter, to go swimming at her nearby community pool. We walked together from her house in our swimsuits with towels draped over our arms along the busy street, and I know Shanna wanted someone to honk at us. She was disappointed when they didn’t. We swam by ourselves, splashing in the water, the way we had rolled around in the fall leaves. I caught her up on all the trailer park gossip. Who was going out with whom, this girl was mad at that girl, this girl or that boy was being so annoying. None of it really mattered; it was junior high chatter at best. It was not saying all the things I should have said at worst. Her letters were both honest and hopeful, but I knew the truth. Every letter she wrote to me told one story, hoping to convince me, and her, of what she wanted to be true. But I knew the real stories. She once wrote that she knew she should stay away from boys and didn’t need them; she needed to concentrate on her school work. In a letter from February 1989, she wrote, “My friends that I told you about aren’t my friends any-

84 PMS.. poemmemoirstory more. They talked bad about me, and did things that weren’t nice. I mean who needs friends like them when they don’t treat you like a friend? I have better friends like you!” Those new school friends had dumped her. I knew she wasn’t hanging around those slumber party girls any longer. She hadn’t made it to the top of that heap after all. The friends she did have didn’t sound like good influences, not to me and my good-girl ways. And I knew there were boys, and I knew she was too young for those boys. She wasn’t concentrating on her school work. Instead she was likely still craving that attention from boys, but now she’d moved past the taunts and flirtatious teasing to let them paw all over her. She signed the letter with, “Best Friends Forever Always. Amy, we are friends and always will be. Not wild horses could drag me away from you. Only death will keep us apart!” But what did I say in reply to those letters? Did I give her advice? What could my adolescent self have said? I didn’t beg to visit her. I called sporadically but didn’t leave messages when she didn’t pick up. Did I ever ask if anything bad had happened to her? Did I ever ask what I was sometimes wondering about her family? Did she ever give me clues about why she knew about sex in a way I did not? No. I didn’t ask those things, and she surely never said. She wouldn’t want to see or hear my inevitable disappointment or disgust. Instead, I sent her little mementos from time to time, but I was growing up without her and I had other friends, the kind you have almost too much in common with, the kind who finish your sentences and speak to you without talking. She was growing up without me. A San Diego newspaper says Shanna likely died of a drug overdose in that alley behind a motel. And there’s never any mention of that heroin- toting boyfriend who took her away to California. Statistics on heroin show that more than 80 percent of heroin users get high with a partner, yet 80 percent of overdose victims are found alone with no one else in sight. Shanna was alone. Senior year, 20 years ago now, I saw Shanna in a buffet restaurant near our old trailer park. We recognized each other immediately, and my gaze fell to the baby in her arms. She’d had sex with an older boy and become pregnant, and there she was, alone, with his son. “His name is Brody Hunter,” she said proudly. She thought that name exuded class, I could tell. Her ice blue eyes sparkled and those freckles scrunched up again. She put on a brave face talking about her baby, about how good

PMS.. 85 Bailey it was to see me, how she missed me. She playfully teased me about not calling or writing, but I knew what she meant behind those questioning eyes and furrowed brow. She meant I’d forgotten about her, and she was on her own. “Oh, I’ve just been so busy with school and all,” I apologized. But I meant that I was leading a different life than she was. I earned great grades and I was headed to college with a few small scholarships. I meant that I didn’t chase boys or have sex yet. I meant that I had friends who were like me, who weren’t controlled by mean stepdads, who didn’t watch uncles jerking off into toilets, who didn’t find dildos on their moms’ beds. I had friends who didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t have boy- friends, didn’t live in trailer parks, and who were also headed to college. I meant I was on my way out of there. I left the restaurant that day shaking my head, wondering what had happened. I didn’t call or write afterward to find out, though. No, I just never saw Shanna again. She had another baby six years later, a daughter, by a different man. I do not know who raised those children. I do not know when she started taking drugs. I do not know who gave them to her. I do not know how often she prostituted herself. I do not know how many blow jobs or fast fucks she was (under)paid for. I do not know exactly how many times she was arrested. I do not know how her family treated her as an adult. I do not know if she ever sought treatment. I do not know how she got to California. I do not know if she understood why I didn’t keep in touch. I do not know much. But I know she was my first playmate in the fall leaves. I know she saw worms in my grandma’s hands. I know she had a marvelous mix of blue eyes and freckles. I know she was feisty. I know she never forgot my uncle’s moment of kindness. I know she thought the world of me. I know we laughed. I know our mouths met. I know we sat together on Santa’s lap and told him our wishes. I know she saw and heard things too young. I know I didn’t have words to respond to those things. I know I should have said more. I know things happened to her, and perhaps she happened to other people. She was 38 and it was almost Christmas when she collapsed onto an electrical utility box, drugs in her lifeless body and in her pockets, deserted in a California alley, thousands of miles from home, thousands of miles from me, her best friend forever always. I don’t know exactly what happened to Shanna, but I know she is dead.

86 PMS.. Grace Cho

Crust Girl

Worthless. That was the word my mother used the first time I saw her in the hospital, after she swallowed four bottles of pills and was delirious from the chemical residue. “Why, Mama? Why would you do something like this?” “Because I feel worthless.” That word, “worthless,” burrowed its way into my psyche and took up residence there like a disease. The next fifteen years I spent driven to find out where my mother’s feelings of worthlessness came from, to get to know that place intimately, and to somehow rid myself of the malady.

After my mother died I started baking pies—about twenty to thirty a week in a commercial kitchen. Until a few years ago I could count on one hand the number of pie shells I had made from scratch. The first one I made at the age of five, when my mother reluctantly let me use her dough scraps to bake a baby pie. It was the first and only time I was ever allowed to cook as a child because my mother believed that I was des- tined to become a scholar and kept me out of the kitchen, lest I derail my path. Twenty-five years later, to her dismay, I enrolled in a professional pastry program where I baked four more pies from scratch. None of them was perfect, but because we worked in pairs, the success or failure of the pies was not mine alone. Overall I did well in school, but pie was neither my strength nor my passion, and when culinary school was over I went back to using frozen pie shells because I doubted that I could produce anything better. I just kept them on hand for whenever the occasion might arise. Once, when I was invited to cook a three-course meal for a fund- raising party, I pulled those crusts out of the freezer to fill with almond frangipane and fresh raspberries. I passed the crust off as my own, too embarrassed to admit I hadn’t made it myself when one of the diners complimented me on it. If my mother had been there, I would have become lazy in her eyes, just as I had when she was living in my coop

PMS.. 87 Cho apartment in Queens and discovered the grease stains on the sides of my cookware. “You need to clean your pots, Grace, or else people will think you don’t have any ambition.” “No, Mom. It has nothing to do with ambition,” I said then, and would say again during the imagined conversation with my dead mother about my failure to execute a pie from scratch. “That’s not it. It’s just that I’m a cake person.” My preference for cakes arose in part from having lacked the confi- dence that my pie skills could ever come close to my mother’s. On one hand, I was afraid that I would fail to live up to her standards, and on the other, I wanted to spare her the shame of the possibility that I might sur- pass her at the very thing she did best. Cake, however, was not part of my mother’s baking repertoire. As an adult I realized that every cake that entered my childhood home had been from Safeway— butterless and cloying, a chemical taste lingering on the palate. I never questioned this until after I had left home, when my first taste of homemade cake was one that I had made myself. I was twenty, a college junior, and lived in my first apartment with two other girls. It was there that I first taught myself to cook. The cake was a white chocolate cheesecake whose recipe came from one of Mollie Katzen’s cookbooks and I made it for a potluck dinner at a graduate student’s house. He was twenty-five, and I remember distinctly that I baked the cake because I wanted him to remember me. I learned that day that a luscious dessert had the power to woo. The world of gourmet cakes was uncharted culinary territory for me and became something I wanted to master. Cake was a delight, something whimsical, and at the same time, serious business. I studied it, like the good student my mother raised me to be. I practiced until I achieved the perfect crumb, the silki- est buttercream, the richest ganache, the most delicate piping around the borders. I baked until I earned a reputation for making the best cakes my friends and associates had ever tasted. You see, Mom. I do have ambition. Baking, my mother later told me, was a worthless pursuit. Despite my culinary training, I became a college professor after finishing graduate school, and “professors don’t bake cakes.” Someone of my stature shouldn’t stoop so low, she always told me. Maybe the fact that she had spent so much time baking was further evidence that it was worthless.

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Apple Pie My mother’s sense of unworthiness was tied up in her need to bake pies. Dozens of pies each month, hundreds of pies each year, her final pie count landing in the thousands. This proliferation of pie must have started with a taste somewhere, of flaky crust and sweet-tart filling, both completely foreign to her Korean palate. That first taste was probably on the U.S. naval base in Korea where she met my father. The foods available on the bases were all-American—hamburgers, hot dogs, apple pie. The bounty of food on the American bases was astounding compared to the typical scarcity of food in post-war Korea during the 1960s and early 70s, when my mother was a young woman. She never spoke much about Korea, and I probably would have grown up not knowing anything about my birth country had we not visited there a few summers of my childhood. More to the point, she didn’t like to talk about hardship—though later, when my Korean relatives joined us in the U.S., the word most frequently uttered was gosaeng—hardship, suffering. It took a long time for me to understand that it was more than happenstance that led us to the U.S. or that there had ever been anything that she needed to escape in Korea. My mother had been a bar hostess in Korea, a position that Koreans pejoratively called “yankee girl,” or depending on who you asked, “yankee whore.” The women who served American service personnel were reviled by Korean society, and often by their own families, for consorting with American men. They were often abused by their employers, their clientele, and their government, who used them as bargaining chips in U.S. foreign relations. Some women even died at the hands of their abusers—men that were never brought to justice. For women like my mother, the American base, with all its luxury, and all its danger, was both a means of escape and the thing from which one needed to escape. In many respects, she was just like any other immigrant who came to U.S. shores in the 1970s—during the second big wave, after U.S. immigration laws were revised to let in more people from the browner regions of the world. If you had asked any of them why they had come, all of their histories, all of their complicated reasons could have been reduced to one cliché: “for a better life.” I know she was disappointed that it wasn’t the America of her dreams, that my father was not the rich man she thought he was, that poverty existed here, too. But at the very least, I

PMS.. 89 Cho think she expected to live a more peaceful and comfortable life than the one she left behind. My mother wanted to forget the past. She believed that she’d somehow be able to melt into the homogeneity of my father’s hometown, and to that end, she embarked on a project of assimilation through the mastery of American cooking. She was still hopeful during her early days in America, or maybe she just got tired of the relentless interrogations from our neighbors. “Are you from China or Japan?” “Do they have this in your country?” “Is it true that they eat dogs in your culture?” Maybe she really believed that her role as wife and mother was to cook the things she thought were familiar to my father or to feed my brother and me things that would not mark us as foreigners. Whatever the reason, American cooking became something she took on with messianic zeal. That is not to say that she abandoned Korean food in favor of American, but learned instead, to eat some things in secrecy. “If American people see us eating this, they will be scared,” my mother said to me once as we chewed our way through a whole dried roasted squid, clusters of tentacled legs dangling from our mouths. We laughed about it at the time, but years later when I was a grown woman, a stranger knocked on my office door and caught me eating dried squid legs. A rush of blood lit up my cheeks as I remembered her words. If American people see us eating this… My mother learned to make a distinction between her private eating and her public performance as a cook and eater. The performance featured her as a slightly off American housewife who tested new recipes from ladies magazines and found mentorship from the octogenar- ian spinsters who lived across the street. This was before the days of the “USO Bride School” a training program for the Korean wives of American servicemen stationed in Korea that taught them first and fore- most how to cook American food. My mother’s cooking training was informal and her immersion in small town America left little room for error. But of course, she did make mistakes. Ovens, for example, are not typically part of a Korean kitchen and certainly for my mother’s genera- tion, they were completely foreign. So the first time my mother attempted baking, her chocolate chip cookies were burnt on the bottom and rock hard. “They’re a little dense,” my father said after gnawing on a cookie with his molars.

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“What’s so dense?” my mother replied, unfamiliar with what cookies were supposed to be like. Her answer to my father’s criticism was ultimately to keep trying until she produced a proper batch of cookies. With cookies under her belt, she moved on to something more challenging, and more quintessen- tially American—apple pie. Baking, for my mother, was a way to become American. Baking was a way to forget.

Blackberry Pie There were things that complicated my mother’s persona as our hometown’s immigrant Betty Crocker, not the least of which was the fact that she was not content with domesticity. Over the years she worked many jobs—as a maid, a security guard, a forager—often at the same time. The hours she spent at work in a given day often surpassed the time she spent at home, and all the effort she poured into keeping house—to cooking and cleaning, to scrubbing those grease stains off the sides of her pots— was driven by ambition. As a woman with barely more than a middle school education, success was a tenuous thing that she could not measure by conventional means. Not by degrees completed or money earned, only by the number of superlatives her work elicited. During her years as a forager, she picked, sold, froze, jammed, and baked a phenomenal quan- tity of wild blackberries, and this feat evoked many exclamations pep- pered with words like “most” and “best.” “Those are the most berries I’ve ever seen in one place!” “You have the best prices anywhere!” “You bake the most delicious blackberry pie!” Foraging was the one activity that allowed her to truly escape the domestic, to lose herself in the wilderness and surrender to the thrill of the hunt, but afterwards she would return home once again to turn on the oven. In the days immediately following my mother’s death, I became awash in memories of her better days, days long before she uttered those words, I feel worthless, when she was active and vibrant and lived her life with purpose. Once she was gone, I asked all the people who had once known her what they remembered most about her. Unequivocally, it was the blackberry pie. It seemed as if my mother’s favorite pastime, aside from picking blackberries, was baking blackberry pies. It was, perhaps, not so much a pastime as it was a compulsion, a need to produce something with the

PMS.. 91 Cho sweat of her own labor that she could call her own, that she could choose to give away and not have taken from her. So many Sunday afternoons she spent with her sleeves rolled up and her arms immersed in giant bowls of flour and shortening, her fingers working the fat and flour together into little pearls of dough. By the end of the day, there would be a dozen hot blackberry pies cooling on the counter, waiting for someone to break open their shells. In retrospect, I see that the blackberries were the real stars of her pies—“small wild blackberries,” as my mother distinguished them from other blackberries whose seeds were large and flavor-muted. The ratio of crust to blackberries was always perfectly balanced, but to my immature palate, the filling was just a condiment for the crust, one that I considered optional. Sometimes I would ask my mother if I could have just the crimped edge of the crust, and as soon as she gave me permission to eat only around the edges, I took the liberty of helping myself whenever I found pies cooling on the counter. One day, I ate the crusts of four or five pies, not knowing that she had planned to give them away. Despite her initial rage, she found a moment of humor in it, and dubbed me “Crust G i r l .” Shortly before my mother’s first suicide attempt, my brother’s wife told me the big family secret. “Your mother used to be a prostitute,” she said. My brother, seven years my elder, remembered the days when she used to get dressed up and go to work at night at the U.S. naval base in Korea. “How do you think she met your father?” he asked, as if I were stupid for not realizing it sooner. Apparently I was the only one in the family that hadn’t known. It had been a secret kept only from me, and why they told me then, I’m not sure. It was partly to explain my mother’s worsening mental illness, as if her past was an answer and not, in itself, a question. My mother prepared me for a life of scholarly pursuits, and as much as I liked school, my choice to spend seven years in graduate school was largely motivated by that fleeting moment, perhaps less than two seconds, during which I heard the words: “Your mother used to be a prostitute.” After three years of reading everything I could find about military prostitution, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program to further commit myself to answering the question of what could have shattered my mother’s spirit

92 PMS.. poemmemoirstory so much that in that moment of drug-induced delirium, she said “I feel worthless.” My project was to eke out every possible connection between those two sets of words: “your mother used to be a prostitute” and “I feel worthless.” What structures and systems and geopolitical events created a social context in which she dared to transgress her societal norms to enter the sex industry? Once there, what small actions and gestures slowly chipped away at her self-esteem? What large-scale transactions crushed her psyche? Once out, did the same things happen all over again, just in a different time and place? The answers to these questions were not at all obvious. Later, after a decade had passed of my investigation, my sister-in-law would say that she had only told me what she told me because I “ought to know.” Because she was “speaking woman to woman.” And somehow she expected me never to do anything with those words except to lock up the secret myself and never speak of it again. When I had made it my life’s work to openly interrogate the words that had haunted me, when I had written hundreds of pages about those words, my sister-in-law revised the storyline. “Your mother was a cocktail waitress. Nothing else.” But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether my mother was a cocktail waitress or a prostitute or something in between, because those words, when they were first spoken, changed me. Your mother used to be a prostitute. That bit of new information was so huge that it erased my old memories. It made me forget all those years when she was my mama, who called me Crust Girl and was famous for her blackberry pies.

Mincemeat Pie In 1994, after my mother’s first suicide attempt, she went back to my father from whom she had been separated. It was a disastrous plan. My father was old and frail, and my mother was suffering from mental illness. Neither of them was capable of taking care of the other. The ratio- nale for my mother returning to my father was that he would somehow prevent her from trying to kill herself again, but she did try again just a couple of months later. It was her second and final suicide attempt. After her failure to execute the suicide the first two times, she swore she would “never try that again.” There was disgust and conviction in her voice when she said it.

PMS.. 93 Cho

“No, I am never gonna try that again.” It was less a promise to herself to survive than it was an attempt to avoid another failure, to shield herself from further humiliation. Regardless, it was somewhat reassuring. By the end of 1997, my parents had separated and gotten back together again twice, then divorced and remarried, and finally were living together under the same roof without speaking to each other, which is how they would live until their second divorce and final separation almost a year later. Christmas of 1997 was the last occasion for which everyone in my immediate family came together, my mother and father still not speaking to each other. We flew to my brother’s house in North Carolina—me from New York and my parents from Seattle. For six hours they sat next to each other on the plane in silence, speaking only to the flight attendants. When they arrived at my brother’s place, my father took his things to the guest room, while my mother unpacked a mincemeat pie from her bag and turned on the oven. The first thing she wanted to do upon seeing her children was to serve us some of her home cooking. My brother and I sat around the kitchen table, sinking our forks into the fragrant pie, but as soon as he took a bite, he darted out of his seat. “Did you put meat in this?” he asked. “What’s the matter?” my mother said, startled by his reaction. “It’s good.” Apparently my brother hadn’t taken the name of the pie literally, nor had he been aware of the culinary history of mincemeat pie, which was traditionally made with a mix of meat and fruit, before it gave way to more common fruit-only versions. I ate the pie faithfully, knowing how much it pleased my mother when people enjoyed her cooking, and how much it hurt when they didn’t. In truth, the pie wasn’t half bad. It didn’t stand up to her blackberry, but it tasted of Christmas with its spices and winter fruits. The bits of meat took the edge off the sweetness of the raisins. Perhaps my father, who had always been a fan of fruit and meat together, would have enjoyed the pie, but he did not sit at the table with us because he was avoiding my mother. I had warned my sister-in-law that having both my parents there for the holiday was a recipe for disaster, but she insisted, thinking that it would have been cruel to invite one parent without the other. My father slept in the guest room while my mother slept in the living room, neither

94 PMS.. poemmemoirstory of them making any effort to thaw the mountain of ice that had built up between them. The day after my parents’ arrival my father began complaining of constipation and asked me to buy him an enema at the drug- store. Against his better judgment, he administered it while lying down on the living room floor. The stench of my father’s feces, trailing behind him as he ran to the bathroom, triggered my gag reflex and I ran outside to heave over the side of the porch. My mother and brother were outside enjoying the warm southern winter when I ran out. “What’s wrong?” they asked in unison. “Dad… just shit… all over your house,” I said to my brother in between gasps of air. My mother waved her hand in the air. “Oh, that. He’s doing that all the time at home and leaving for me to clean up.” The incident sabotaged our Christmas Eve dinner preparations. My mother’s mincemeat pie sat on the counter with two slices taken out of it, only one of them eaten.

My Conversion to Pie The mincemeat was the last pie my mother ever baked. My father died later that year and my mother moved to the East Coast. For the next eleven years, the remainder of her life, she never turned on the oven again. I don’t know if it was the Christmas gone wrong, the lack of appreciation for her mincemeat, or the realization that no matter how many pies she baked, no matter how good they were, she could not resurrect the sense of accomplishment that she had once garnered from her pies. Baking had turned into a worthless pursuit. From that point forward, during the last eleven years of my mother’s life, I began to bake in earnest. It was also during this time that I enrolled in graduate school to study the social and historical roots of my mother’s mental illness. Over the years, I put together little pieces that helped me come a little bit closer to the things that fed her sense of unworthiness. There was a time when she must have been immersed in messages of how little value her life had, when she was no longer regarded as a person, but as a thing. These messages came from the people around her, Korean society, maybe even her own family. She escaped Korea and became a new American only to learn that American society devalued her, too. As much as I wanted an answer to the nagging question of what

PMS.. 95 Cho made my mother feel worthless, I always knew that I could never truly know her pain. After a while, I began to eschew a life of study and grow my desire to feed people instead, and that’s when I enrolled in culinary school. I specialized in cake, but hadn’t really considered how much my desire to bake, like my desire to study, had been profoundly influenced by my mother. Baking was a process of getting to know her and of learning to win her over. As much as she discouraged me from baking, she submitted to the pleasures of eating my cakes. When my mother died, I began to bake professionally and found out that what people wanted more than cake was pie.

So here I find myself, conjuring up memories of my mother in the kitchen, turning out dozens of pies with the speed and skill of a master baker. She knows that pie is not my strength and has saved me on several occasions, guiding me through the delicate process of transferring rolled dough into the pan without ripping it, or repairing torn dough without turning it into leather. I’m still an amateur next to my mother, and in those imagined conversations I have with her, she is still saying, “professors don’t bake” and “stop wasting your time on something worthless.” But I continue to bake all kinds of pies—strawberry rhubarb, blueberry peach, raspberry plum, rosemary apricot, brown butter pecan, chocolate walnut, key lime, cranberry pear, vegan pies, gluten-free pies– all variet- ies that my mother never made. I imagine her tasting each one and saying it is good, but not as good as her blackberry. “Always,” I tell her. She is right.

96 PMS.. Casie Cook

A Temporary Vessel

Everything disappears, everything’s brief. —Mark Doty

A dozen urns, made of brass and steel and lumber and clay, rest on rows of shelves in this small room, spotlights highlighting each of them like fine vases on museum display. You must pick one. Which one? How do you choose? You could go with the most ordinary, brushed pewter with two black stripes around the mouth. You could select a wooden one. Wood is natural and warm, but this one looks cheap, a box for a leafy houseplant, the resilient type that live and live no matter how often you fail to water them. That is not the kind of container you’re after. You need a temporary vessel for your dead father. You remember picking out a flannel for him at a department store two months ago. And here you are, dressing his ashes. Not you alone, you and your little brother, who is beside you staring at the funeral home lineup, scanning the objects left to right and left again. The two of you stand unmoving, looking without feeling. You do not speak. What is there to say? For months now you’ve been washing downriver, the rapids pulling you repeatedly under. You surrender at times to the deep waters, allow them to swallow you, hold you, numb you. You watched as your dad drowned, not by watery submergence, but drowning seems an appropriate appellation for the final weeks and days. You survived—and that means you must come to the cold surface and make a few final decisions. “That one,” you say, and your brother agrees because what does it matter, the ashes won’t be inside it for long.

In the morning hours the day before he died, my father got up from the sofa and walked to the bathroom down the hall. Every few careful steps, he paused to rest on the walker, adjust the oxygen tube that ran from

PMS.. 97 Cook behind his ears and looped down around his nose. I saw him thinking hard about the motions necessary for movement, his eyes darting from his hands clenched around aluminum bars, to the bathroom door, to his stocking feet peeking out of pajama pants. This was the man who could be found dancing through the house just a year before, Eric Clapton on guitar raging from stereo speakers. After making it to the bathroom that Friday morning, he shuffled toward a plush chair in the living room, lowered himself onto the cushion and sat, hands gripping the walker, eyes fixed on his swollen feet. The flannel he wore overwhelmed his bony frame. During the last few months, his body aged quickly, fifty-two years of life disappearing by the day. I sat on the sofa nearest the chair waiting for Marie, the hospice nurse. Marie was maybe five years older than I, not much taller, and she also had blonde hair. Her first name was my middle name. She treated my dad like an adult after he’d been treated like a child for months in the hospital. Marie arrived mid-morning, sat next to Dad’s chair, and withdrew a blood pressure monitor from her nylon bag along with a child-sized cuff to fit around his arm. After several pumps, she unwrapped the cuff and walked over to me. His blood pressure was so low she said his heart could stop any minute. She couldn’t believe he was awake and sitting upright and suggested we try getting him into bed. For weeks, he had been sleeping on the sofa to avoid the bedroom. He knew once he was in there that would be it. That is where he would die. My brother Danny watched quietly as Marie and I moved toward Dad. She asked if he would be more comfortable in his bed. His eye- brows came together, creating wrinkles like waves across his forehead. I have Dad’s tall forehead, along with its finest feature: rows of wrinkles with any rush of anxiety. He used to tell me to wear sunglasses because squinting made the wrinkles worse over time. He said I didn’t want to end up with a forehead like his. I figured it was inevitable considering I already had his curls and the same freckles dotted across my nose. With a firm nod, Dad told Marie he was fine in the chair. I grabbed Danny and we gathered around our father, kneeling. I held his hands, which had become small and delicate in his final months, nothing like the solid, callused hands I’d known since I was a kid. His face was almost unrecognizable, gaunt and pale.

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I looked into his eyes, kind and wondering and blue, and told him I loved him. His words came softly, “I love you too, Kid.” I needed to say the words, needed to hear them back. Told Danny to do the same. It would be the last time.

The next evening, Dad lay tucked beneath layers of sheets and a thick throw he had since before I was born. Printed on the oversized indigo blanket were three geese flying toward a tangerine sun. I had been sitting at his bedside for several hours, talking to him as he slept and holding his hand as tears drenched my face and neck, reading and writing in a notebook. As I scrawled my pen across the page, I listened for each deep breath in and out, lifting my gaze to see his chest rise and fall until in time it stopped and a final breath escaped from between his lips and I was alone.

The last time I remember seeing him smile was Valentine’s Day, twelve days before he died. I brought him a petite rose bush with twists of smooth, red petals atop delicate, leafy stems. I chose a potted plant over freshly cut roses. Fresh flowers die, and we weren’t speaking of death. We didn’t exchange a lifetime of memories. I didn’t tell him how I would miss him. Maybe I was waiting for a miracle. Maybe I felt I had already lost him. Maybe he felt he had lost me too—lost everything, been cheated. I wonder if he cried into pillowcases like I did and woke up questioning, before reaching full consciousness, whether the cancer had been only a dream. I helped him take his medications several times a day, hooked up the feeding tube machine at night, and poured endless glasses of ice water. For months he was taking more than twenty different medications, and I made a list of which ones had to be taken when. Most were liquid on account of the feeding tube. The pills I crushed and stirred with the liq- uids, sucking the mixture into a large syringe to push it through the tube in his abdomen. One afternoon I removed the syringe too quickly, not realizing there was still medication inside. When I pulled it from the tube, the orange liquid sprayed into my face and spilled all over Dad’s lap. He looked down at his soaked pants and up at me. “It’s fine,” he shrugged.

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I laughed, hysterically. I don’t know why but I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t funny. The whole scene was pathetic. And there I was, giggling, my father looking up at me in confusion and surrender. I guess I was surrendering too. It was not something I understood. How does a person give up? What happens in that moment? It does happen in a moment, a startling awareness sneaks in front of you. At least that’s what happened to me. It wasn’t a matter of letting go, but of being consumed fully and relentlessly by my own powerlessness. After I cleaned up the mess, Dad said I shouldn’t have to take care of him. It was only fair, I told him, since he’d taken care of my brother and me, and on his own after our mother left twelve years earlier. He mumbled something about not knowing whether he was any good at it.

The urn we chose was a traditional vase shape, silvery with a gold band of carved leaves and flowers around its wide middle. Danny and I knew before discussing it that we would spread Dad’s ashes near the Lake Superior shoreline in the northern Minnesota town of Grand Marais. The town rests at the edge of the Boundary Waters, more than a million acres of woodlands, lakes and streams near the Canadian border. Dad took yearly trips to the North Shore, usually alone. It was the one place he could simply be. After he died, I flipped through the photos on his digital camera, the one I’d given him a few years earlier to replace an old 35mm. On the memory card was a series of shots taken during his last trip to the Boundary Waters. A moose had come upon his campsite. Moose are massive, solitary animals—aggressive if threatened. This one was without antlers, a female. Dad had followed her, camera in hand, snapping away in the gloaming of the day. The photos are dark, amplifying the yellow glow of the animal’s eyes. In the first photo, she’s walking away from the camera through a grassy clearing between tall pines and aspen. The next several photos show her turning to look at my dad, who I have no doubt sought the attention of this grand cow. I wonder how long they stood there, quietly observing one another as the wind whistled through leaves and dusk turned to dark. I bet he had the time of his life pursuing that moose. I imagine he returned to his camp, heart beating wildly, a smile across his face as he

100 PMS.. poemmemoirstory cooked canned chili on the portable propane stove and prepared his gear for the next day’s fly-fishing. Danny and I waited to head north until the trees began to bud, the grass came out from beneath its white blanket, and the lakes shed their icy crusts. We made the trip in June—Father’s Day weekend.

When the day came, I went to pull the urn from inside the old wooden chest where I kept it. The chest, which belonged to my dad, holds thousands of our childhood photos. There among the musty three-by-fives was the urn, shrouded in its emerald cloth pouch. I grabbed it with both hands near the base and lifted it from the sea of images. I had forgotten how heavy it was, at least 25 pounds, a quarter of my own weight. I placed it in a small cardboard box for stability. I pulled into Danny’s driveway, and he slipped into the passenger seat. Eyes half open, he glanced over his shoulder. “You buckled him in?” I had belted the boxed urn into the backseat of my Volkswagen. “I don’t want ashes spilling all over the car,” I said to my brother. He chuckled quietly and shook his head. We drove five hours north to Grand Marais. The last half of the route on Highway 61 hugs the Lake Superior shoreline. Every so often, the tall trees separating the road from the shore parted and I looked out over the lake, a great blue expanse that winked when the light hit waves just right. Danny slept with his seat tilted back, the lid of his baseball cap covering his face. We passed roadside gift shops, inns with paint peeling from the siding, and signs pointing to hiking trails and landmarks. Trees like sky-high fences on either side of the two-lane highway retreated and the road opened as we descended downhill upon the harbor town. I could see the roofs of small buildings huddled together in rows on either side of the main street that appears to end in the lake. If I hadn’t known it was Lake Superior in the distance, I’d have sworn we found a third coast, the ocean of the Midwest. Our old hotel was steps from the water. The windows in our room had been left open, welcoming the cool lake air, the screeching of seagulls. We dropped our bags on the beds and headed across the street to Sven and Ole’s, the town’s beloved pizza place. A sheet of paper posted on the door announced their Father’s Day special: a free ice cream sun-

PMS.. 101 Cook dae for all dads, all weekend long. Danny and I ordered a pepperoni and sausage pizza to share and sat at a table near the window. The nets of mozzarella hanging from our mouths after each bite reminded me of homemade pizza nights with Dad. We’d dust the kitchen table with flour, roll out sticky dough, and paint it with tomato sauce and toppings. We were young then. We were young still. I was twenty- five and my brother almost twenty-two. We devoured four slices each, guzzled our Cokes, and discussed quietly where we should spread Dad’s ashes—the most serious conversation I’ve had over pizza. “Obviously near the water,” Danny said. “That could be anywhere.” “Well, yeah, I guess.” He shoved the last of a slice in his mouth and chewed slowly. “Should we walk out there maybe?” I pointed out the window past our hotel to a span of rocks and trees reaching into the lake. Danny nodded and we finished eating. We walked along a dirt path to a stretch of gray and iron-red basalt rock that vanished into the water. A rocky path south from where we stood led to a lighthouse jutting out into the harbor. To the north, the rugged shoreline curved around a small forest at the center of the penin- sula and appeared to go on for miles toward what a wooden sign off the path told us was Artists’ Point. The two of us moved across rocky terrain toward the point, stopping every few minutes to watch shelves of water crash over jagged rocks and rain down the sides. Between the mainland and the point are several small ravines with shallow rivers ten feet or more below. We bounded over the narrow openings like we’d done as kids roaming the shores of Minnesota’s lakes and rivers with Dad. I brought a backpack to conceal the urn. I didn’t want anyone to know what we were doing. Since it was too heavy to wear comfortably on my back, I hugged it close to my chest. We stopped at the outermost point and stood close. It was quiet except for the crashing of waves. We noticed a spot not far from us that looked as if a giant hand had reached out of the largest freshwater lake in the world and taken a scoop. The tiny cove held a shallow pool of calm water that flowed through a passage into the lake. Without hesitation and without many words, we decided that was it. I stepped down onto the rock ledge surrounding the pool and my brother followed. The walls of the cove were six feet tall, just high

102 PMS.. poemmemoirstory enough to hide us. I crouched close to the water, pulled the urn from the backpack and removed the lid for the first time. The ashes inside were in a plastic bag with a twist tie around it. Just a plain old twist tie, the kind you find on a loaf of bread, with a small square tag hanging from it. A few numbers were scribbled across the tag. No name. I assumed ashes would be charcoal in color like cinders left from a campfire. I’d been wrong. Ashes are the color of flesh. I undid the twist tie. Danny helped me hold the heavy urn as we tipped it toward the water. I thought ashes would be grainy like sand and pour easily. Wrong again. Ashes are delicate, soft as baking flour. As soon as we started pouring a few inches from the water’s surface, the wind took the ashes and whirled them around us. I stopped. I didn’t want to be covered in his ashes. I didn’t want them filling my lungs. I didn’t want any of it. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” I said to Danny. I thought it would be a peaceable gesture. I thought maybe we’d speak tearful good- byes and I don’t know what else. Not this. Danny still held the body of the urn with both hands. I dipped the opening of the plastic bag into the water. We poured together. We poured quickly. We said nothing. The ashes released into the pool, filling the clear water like clouds rushing into open sky until finally the bag was empty and the entire pool was the color of skin. That was my father. That’s what was left. That and whatever of him is part of me, part of Danny. I stood up and thoughtlessly tossed the urn as far as I could into the waves. It landed with a thick splash and together we watched the vessel sink among the whitecaps. The second I let go I wished it back into my hands. I wished it all back—Dad; our lives before death; the day I graduated from college and thoughtlessly denied his request for a photo together; the evening he brought homemade soup to my apartment when I was in bed with a flu; the times he invited me over for dinner and I declined, thinking there’d be plenty more ahead; the afternoon we spent at the driving range after he gave me a set of clubs, a final birthday gift; the night the two of us climbed a ladder to the roof and sat atop shingles watching mid-summer fireworks burst against a darkened sky; the time I was fourteen and kicked my foot through a closet door as we screamed at each other, over what I can’t remember; the sound of his voice calling me Kid even into my twenties; the hours we spent on his sunlit patio

PMS.. 103 Cook listening to bluesy rock on the old radio, smiling between stories and roaring with laughter until breathless. Sometimes I wonder if the lake might offer him back up. I catch myself looking for him on sidewalks and in stores and near any lake- shore, as if he’s bound to come running toward me, scoop me up like he did when I was little, tell me he’s been looking all over for me, ask where I’ve been.

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Alina Stefanescu

Carpool

There are parents of East Ridge Middle School students who don’t let their kids ride the bus. These parents prefer waiting in the curled line of cars that coils out onto a thoroughfare. I call it the carpool line, but it’s really more like a snake. Anyone who’s been in a carpool line knows how the generous ordeal of waiting rounds into a raptor’s beak, swallowing ten-minute chunks of time, intervals large enough for puppy flea baths and Publix recipes. We burn the wasted time by imagining quality-time opportunities on the drive back to the house. Still, I wonder about the devout corporals of everyday carpools, myself included, I wonder why we do it. US News and World Report says professional women comprise the demographic most likely to avoid the school bus option at all costs. They are also more likely than stay-at-home moms to conduct heated phone conversations at high volumes while waiting. Good Housekeeping says there are family values at stake. The way I see it, conversations about “family values” reflect a deep resentment and anger in the upper middle classes of America. Blame is easily attached to those stereotypes who happen to be absent from the table during the specific discussion. I like to tell my kids “life is tough, and there’s not a single fair hair in it .” *

In the Volkswagen two cars ahead sits Katie Richardson, wife of Dr. Peter Richardson, an eminent local cardiologist. Katie went to medical school for six years before quitting. At one point, she says she realized that most people’s lives weren’t worth saving. Being a doctor didn’t follow logically from this premise, so Katie did the next best thing and married a handsome cardiologist whom people called “Dr. Peter” for short. Katie’s middle son usually waits close to the curb, like he has better things to do than hang out with his peers. You can tell from the purple

PMS.. 107 Stefanescu lining on his hoodie and the Skittles logo on his baseball cap that he is a brony. I wonder how Katie copes. Put-together. That’s Katie. She’s texting someone on her cell phone, that shiny brown hair loose over her shoulders, fresh from the tennis court showers. I’ve never known Katie to lose her temper in the carpool line; she’s not the honk-and-yell type. More the slow-food-simmering type. Katie prefers her family as an object nestled within the confines of a wooden frame. Unlike the three screaming boys which race towards her car, stumbling over one another to claim the front seat, Katie’s framed family is something she can hold which cannot hold her back.

Marybell Simpson wears her hair cropped close to the skull, a silken red helmet that magnifies the snap of authority in her voice. Recently divorced, Marybell stays busy serving on multiple committees to beautify and better the city. Her daughter, Carmen, wears black combat boots to school every day and swears she plans to join the French foreign legion as soon as she graduates high school. When Marybell laughs, you never know what she means by it. Also, you get the sense of an animating slogan—maybe “the truth shall set you free”—that stands behind her condemnation of local robberies and vandalism with the weight of justice. Marybell is the honk-yell-and-curse type. If I weren’t happily married, I’d drive over to Marybell’s house with a bottle of cheap merlot, pull down her pants, and press my tongue deep into her sweeter side. There’s something about Marybell that swings either way. What comes off as pressure in the carpool line reveals itself as passion under different circumstances.

My husband is a novice, a newbie who has only experienced the carpool line three times during our eight years of marriage. “Women in cars with kids scare me,” he claims. A tiny red robin skips over the patio table, bearing witness to his failed endeavor at empathy. Oh, what the birds have seen.

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Melody Carmichael is the youngest of the six Carmichael kids. They usually wait together, standing kite-shaped next to the aloe plants near the front door. People say the Carmichaels are a lovely Christian family. If they added the word “precious” to this description, one might know what to make of it. Lacking the disingenuousness of “precious,” however, we are left with something between “good people” and “signposts of the community.” Which isn’t saying much. Mrs. Carmichael drives the van while her husband, Mr. Carmichael, plays accompaniment. Melody wishes her dad would stay home by himself rather than ride with Mom. His contribution to the family ride is unimpressive—he just noodles around the front seat and takes up space, complaining about the air conditioner and any music Mrs. Carmichael seeks to lighten the load. He’s an old man, racing the dimming of memory to get back to his story, the one he has rehearsed and rewritten over family dinners, the one he knows best.

Usually, a brown van missing its rear window stops for all the Mexican kids. I admire their extended kinship networks, the way they roll in and out of each other’s clothing like family. It must be nice to be disenfranchised, trapped at the bottom of the social ladder, knowing better than to take an insincere smile for cur- rency. As the van drives away, I catch the whiff of a song, kids singing and laughing in their secret language. Maybe I’ll cook tacos tonight for dinner.

Some people believe that forms of time—past, present, and future—exist simultaneously. I read this in Secular Humanist magazine while getting the oil in my car changed. That’s all very fine and good in conjunction with illustrations from the Hubble Space telescope, but things look different when you sit behind the wheel in the East Ridge Middle School carpool line. PMS.. 109 Stefanescu

If someone paid me to write an article about time for a magazine that can afford fancy illustrations, I would get my head out of the clouds and tell a true story. Maybe explain how time is like citizenship, a participa- tory delusion, a trick we play with flags and symbols. Looking at 3:55 pm makes it hard to avoid a particular present.

I can’t imagine what people think of me in the carpool line. Church friends describe me as easy-going and personable. I find it easier to adopt a vague stance of acceptance when forced to talk politics. Agreeing with everyone is easier than you might think. People want you to agree with them more than they want you to be honest or tell the truth about things. So they strike the inconsistencies from the record and offer to refill your drink.

Snoopy Hayes has more friends than she knows how to count. Never in my time of PTA luncheons and Boy Scout baking parties have I met a person who didn’t just lo-o-ove Snoopy. If someone buries a puppy, Snoopy knows the right Hallmark card for the occasion. Being in the carpool line behind Snoopy feels like tailgat- ing—the party creeps right along, bumper to bumper, a bevy of giggles. Her husband, Walter, is a recovering stock broker who found his second calling teaching business classes at a small liberal arts college fifteen minutes outside of town. Whenever we have dinner with Snoopy and Walter, the conversation rolls around to Wall Street. Last week, Walter said capitalism runs on the stench of testosterone, the hormone that demands competitive posturing and thrives on unintended conflicts. “Are you talking about the war in Iraq?” I asked, trying to sound urbane. Walter chuckled and Snoopy made a joke about Saddam Hussein being in a foxhole. All of us laughed for lack of anything better to do. Now, whenever I pass Snoopy in the carpool line, she scrunches down into the driver’s seat and pokes her head up, singing, “Peekaboo. I’m Saddam Hussein and I’m as dead as a dormouse.” What else can I do but giggle and wave? When it comes to loving life, Snoopy takes the cake.

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The award for most immaculate carpool line vehicle goes to Lacey Smith and her platinum Lexus. Mr. Smith is her husband. He’s also the only man I’ve ever heard to use the nickname, “Honey,” as an expletive. Maybe that’s why Lacey and her two daughters love Sarah Palin—why they call themselves “conservatives.” Political ideology reminds me of those long, boring pauses that punctuate soap operas and keep people from hearing what the other just said. I try to stay away from politics. To be a conservative is to stick to the story you were telling before your spouse ruined it by having an affair.

On our annual trip to the Eastern shore this year, my mother-in-law described time as the distance between heaven and earth. We agreed to disagree on time, the nutritional benefits of jello, and whether there are special tests administered to verify the Pope’s virginity. I just can’t imagine how physiologists could find something approximating a hymen in males.

My husband’s name is Richard, but after our first baby was born I started calling him “Dick” for short. At first he laughed when I said it, but then he got used to it. We started to feel like I’d always called him Dick and I’d never been married to a Richard at all. Phil Danson, our marriage counselor, used to show up in the carpool on Tuesdays when his wife taught water aerobics but then the Dansons enrolled their kids at Our Lady of the Holy Robe Catholic School and we never see them anymore. Dick was pissed when he found out about the Danson kids changing schools. “They’re not even Catholic!” he yelled. We stopped using Phil as our marriage counselor after that because Dick said he just couldn’t bear giving money to a papist. Even though I liked Phil, I knew better than to argue with Dick about money or marriage counseling or anything related to religion. Dick calls

PMS.. 111 Stefanescu himself a “straight-shooting guy” and he’ll talk your ear off about Masons and Mormons and anyone who doesn’t attend our user-friendly mega- church. Though Dick doesn’t know it, what Phil taught me might have saved our marriage. On our third counseling session, Dick called to say he was running late so Phil told me about meeting the Dalai Lama or the Lama’s son or some version of the Lama himself. “That’s amazing,” I said in my most serious voice. “Yes, it was pretty amazing. I’ll never forget all the orange…” When Phil got quiet, I figured he was reminiscing. Phil’s the kind of man who likes to think about things without making any noise. He folds into himself neat as a pleat. “Look Meri, I’m not sure I’ve been fair to you in all this counseling.” “Phil, what a funny thing to say. Of course I’m sure that you have. But life doesn’t have a fair hair in it, anyway.” The way he laughed, I worried he might come to pieces. I’ve never seen a man laugh like that before—like he was shaking his fist at an iron, defying the steam to press things flat. “You’re an amazing woman, Meri.” I wondered how close Dick might be—whether he’d passed the abandoned Steak-n-Shake yet. “I want you to do something for me,” Phil said without laughing. “Can you do that? Can you do something for me that will make me feel like a better therapist?” Nodding, I pulled my knees tighter together to flush away the thoughts coming fast from the usual put-me-on-a-couch-and-tell-me-to- talk ache. “Meri, I want you…” Gosh, how I wished he would stop right there. “...to take care of your own needs first.” “Is that all?” “No. There’s more. I also want you not to wait for other people to make you happy before you decide to be happy.” I can’t tell you how frivolous and carefree I felt at that moment sitting and waiting for Dick to arrive so we could work on our marriage. I can’t tell you what we do before one need swells an octave to include another. Therapists’ offices all have the same vinyl smell, the same boring chairs, the same ambiance of sterility, like nothing good could ever grow there.

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When Dick showed up, we talked for a little while about boundaries and borders then Phil convinced us to start jogging together. Dick kept pushing back on the borders. “I don’t understand why we need to talk about borders,” he complained. “Maybe so we don’t accidentally trespass?” “I mean, can you show me the exact borders for our county line? No, no of course you can’t! But we still live in this county, and list this as our county of residence on tax forms.” His forehead ruffled like the underside of a portobello. I thought about making veggie lasagna for dinner. “We don’t need to know the boundaries to live in this county… Do we, honey?” Dick needed reassurance so I leaned over and kissed his cheek, sur- prised by the way his skin gets softer every year. “No, of course we don’t, honey. After all, we’re not mapmakers.” Then Dick told a joke about how the only difference between a red- neck and a yuppie is a county line while I washed the zucchini for the lasagna.

I don’t regret having children. And if I had things to do over, I’d probably still waste hours of time renegotiating my place in the daily carpool line. But I’d like to think I wouldn’t stop there. Maybe do more to develop myself as a person—definitely wear more yellow and learn about heir- loom plants. Maybe admit time lies in the way we choose to tell it so the telling, itself, makes it lie. Sheesh, now I sound like a typical carpool mom who doesn’t know her way around certain words but here’s the thing: no one ever backs up. In the carpool line, there is no going back.

PMS.. 113 Emily Rems

Andy

My mom was gone for a while before I figured out that she had split for good. She’s a painter with a workspace on Avenue D that she shares with a bunch of other squatters, and she’s out most of the time and sometimes doesn’t come home until morning. At least I had the keys. Before I turned 12, my mom used to say, “No son of mine is going to be a latch-key child.” I kept telling her that it was 1988 and everyone else in my class had keys. But she’d watched some dumb NBC News Special Report about how latch-key kids were the silent victims of the feminist revolution, so she wanted to let me in after school herself. That would have been fine if she’d been home when I got back from PS 15. But she never was. So I’d wait for her on the spiky green welcome mat in the hall outside our apartment or on the marble stoop outside the building. Back when I was in fourth grade, I only had to wait about half an hour before she’d run up the stairs, her pink hair sticking out in all directions and her bangle bracelets clattering so loudly, I could hear her before I could see her. She’d unlock the door, kiss my face, ask me how school was, and then put a frozen dinner in the oven for me before heading out again to whatever party or rock show or art opening she had going on that night. By the time fifth grade rolled around, those minutes locked outside became hours, and I started having problems. The first time my mom was over three hours late, my insides felt all twisted up, and the longer I waited, the more I had to use the bathroom. Finally, she showed up, acting as if nothing was wrong, and I made it to the toilet just in time. When I asked her why she was so late, she said she was busting her ass to pay the rent, so I shut up about it. But later that night, she pulled me close on the couch during the 11 o’clock News and asked me if I knew that she loved me. She smelled like clove cigarettes and paint thinner and sweat. I said yes and wriggled out from between her white, veiny arms to go put on my pajamas. “Why are you always hiding from me in your room?” she shouted from the couch during the commercial break. “I’m afraid to go in there because I don’t know if I’ll find you playing with

114 PMS.. poemmemoirstory your Legos or jerking off.” I hated it when she said stuff like that, so I just pretended I couldn’t hear her and put myself to bed. The next time she was super late, I couldn’t hold my pee so I knocked on old Mrs. Epstein’s door and asked if I could use her bathroom. She didn’t want to let me in, but when she peeked through the peephole and saw my knees buckling in a last ditch effort to keep from whizzing all over the hall, she waved me in toward a pink powder room decorated with seashells. Afterward, I thanked her and tried to leave before my mom caught me bothering the neighbors, but she told me to sit down and pointed at the kitchen table. She poured me a glass of grape juice and spooned a weird white dumpling out of a jar onto a tea saucer and set it in front of me. I thanked her for the juice and pretended not to see the dish. She asked if I wanted to call my mom and gestured at the phone hanging next to the fridge. I told her no thanks, that my mom’s studio didn’t have a phone. She frowned and asked where my dad was. I said he was traveling around painting murals on government buildings. She frowned some more and asked if I had a babysitter to watch me after school, but I pretended I couldn’t understand the question through her thick Eastern European accent. I thanked her again for the juice and left just in time to see my mom in a paint-spattered pair of coveralls lugging a grocery bag full of frozen dinners up the stairs. I hoped she hadn’t seen me leave Mrs. Epstein’s, but no such luck. She waved at the old lady’s peephole, then dragged me inside our apartment where I caught holy hell. She didn’t hit me or anything, but she did scare the crap out of me. “Damnit Andy, do you want to be taken away from me?” she whispered, as if child protective services were already waiting outside the door, listening. I shook my head no. “Well that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you keep advertising the fact that I’m running late,” she warned, poking me in the chest with a calloused finger. “Do you know what happens to kids in foster care? Do you?” she demanded. I nodded yes. She had already freaked me out with stories deliberately read out of the newspaper and NBC Special Reports about the lost children of The System. And while I knew my life wasn’t perfect, I also knew I was lucky not to be one of them. “But I really had to pee,” I explained, trying not to whine but not totally succeeding. She softened a little, and I thought I might actually get keys. But she wasn’t ready. “You’re too young to have keys,” she said,

PMS.. 115 Rems jiggling her own set nervously from hand to hand. “What if you got mugged and someone took your keys and robbed us?” she asked, gesturing toward the TV. “From now on, pee before you leave school,” she said, “and if you still have to go while you’re waiting, find a McDonald’s, or a dumpster you can hide behind to do your business.” Alphabet City didn’t have too many McDonald’s, but we did have plenty of dumpsters. So after the Mrs. Epstein incident, I pissed behind every dumpster from FDR Drive to Second Avenue. It kind of became my thing. I thought if I always pissed behind the same dumpster, people would start complaining about “the kid always pissing behind our dumpster.” So instead, I’d case different areas for privacy, and then pounce like a ninja when the timing was right. I was usually lucky about not getting caught, but finally my luck ran out. I was taking care of business in a parking lot behind Stuy Town when some eighth graders popped up out of the dumpster and caught me. “Hey! Look what I found!” a tall skinny kid in a Knicks jersey shouted, jumping down from the ledge of the metal container and grabbing my arms behind my back. “If someone leaves sneakers, a bookbag, and a ball cap outside on trash day, that means they’re up for grabs, right?” A chubby kid in head-to-toe green camo struggled to the lip of the box as trash shifted beneath him. He stared at me, confused, until he finally caught on. “Oh yeeeaaaaaah!” he replied, swinging one stubby leg over the edge and then the other before cautiously dropping to the ground. Two more kids in acid-washed jeans and heavy metal T-shirts followed, both filthy and stinking from wet food trash. They were the scariest ones, because they didn’t say a word. They just walked casually up to me, knocked the hat off my head, wrenched the bag from my shoulder, and removed my shoes one at a time, as if this were their real job and the dumpster diving had just been a lunch break. “You got something to say faggot?” Knicks kid asked. I shook my head no and kept my eyes down on my big toe sticking out from the tip of my sock. “Didn’t think so,” said camo kid, before hocking a loo- gie right on my head where my hat had been. That made the silent kids laugh, which I guess broke the tension enough for Knicks kid to let me go. “Run back home to mommy, pussy,” he growled. So I took off toward home, trying not to flinch at the little pebbles and chunks of asphalt and beer bottle shards that bit into my heels.

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By the time Mom got home, it was too late to buy me new shoes since all the stores were closed. Luckily she wasn’t mad. She was just coming home to change before going out again, and she said the party that night was really really important for her career, so she didn’t really care that I had lost my shoes and bag and hat. Mom played Siouxsie and the Banshees super loud on her boom box while she set her hair in hot rollers, then painted her eyes with heavy black liner just like the picture on the cassette cover. I stayed in my room for a while after that, since she liked to change clothes over and over again all over the apartment before a party. But when I finally did come out, she was wearing a tight black dress with a bunch of silver amulets around her neck, and her hair looked like a puffy pink cloud of cotton candy. I told her she looked awesome, and she giggled like the girls who hung out on the smoking patio after school. In the morning, still wearing the dress from the night before, she took me by cab in my socks to Payless on Delancey and told me I could pick out any pair of Pro Wings I wanted from the clearance rack. Then she walked me over to the locksmith and had a set of apartment keys made for me. She tucked them in my pocket, along with a note for my teacher Ms. Conway explaining my lateness and my missing schoolbooks, and told me I could walk the rest of the way to school by myself. Once I had keys, Mom didn’t even try to be home at a certain time. Days would go by without us crossing paths, but I would know that she had been there because either the freezer would be refilled with frozen dinners, or there would be a 20 tucked beneath a little ceramic cat that she kept on the kitchen counter. I liked the money better, because I could use it to get Twizzlers and cheese-flavored popcorn from the bodega for dinner instead of eating the mushy Hungry Man green beans and damp fried chicken. But a 20 was supposed to last me more than one day, so if I wasn’t careful and spent it all at once, I’d either have to go to bed hungry the next day or invite myself over to Tran’s house for dinner. Tran was one of the only kids at PS 15 less popular than I was, because when he started there in September, he didn’t speak any English. He spent part of the day in the English as a Second Language room, and part of the day in Ms. Conway’s class. But when he was with us, every time he was called on, the girls would whisper about his accent and the guys at the back of the room would pull the corners of their eyes into slits and bow at each other. They called him “gook” and “chink” in the

PMS.. 117 Rems cafeteria and made fun of the weird-smelling food his mom packed him for lunch. And even though there were other Vietnamese kids at our school, they said he was “fresh off the boat,” and stayed away as if his immigration status were a disease none of them wanted to catch. His mom packed him lunch every day, and once I told him he was lucky, since I never had food from home. The next day, he sat down across from my usual spot at a table labeled “the cootie corner,” by the extra pretty Puerto Rican girls who hung out toward the middle of the cafeteria. When Tran unpacked his bag, he had a takeout box for me. He said the little cigar-looking things inside were fresh rolls, and he even brought dipping sauce to go with them. I asked him if he thought the Fresh Prince ate fresh rolls, but he had no idea what I was talking about. The food was good, so I asked him if he would trade me more in exchange for help with English. He gave me a thumbs up, and then carefully bent his fingers into the sign for OK. After that, I ate better than anyone else at PS 15. And then after school, Tran would use the payphone at the bus stop to ask his mom if he could come over to practice English. On the days she said yes, we would sit together on my saggy, stained couch and watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or ThunderCats. During the commercials, he’d ask about the plots in broken English and I would try to explain. Sometimes I’d do this by talking really slow and loud or by writing out the storyline, because reading English words was easier for him than listening to them. If I was feeling creative, I’d draw pictures explaining what I wanted to say, and if I wanted to be really goofy about it, I’d act the stories out, which always made Tran laugh. At first, we could barely understand each other, but soon he was picking up the language on TV faster and faster. Although a few times, I had to explain that it wasn’t cool in real life to say “cowabunga dude,” so don’t ever do it at school. On many nights, I’d wake up briefly to the jangling of mom’s bracelets just before dawn. Then I’d pass her slumped on the couch with the morning news blaring on the TV in front of her while I was on my way out the door to school. If her feet were still on the floor and in her shoes, I’d slip the grimy converse or spike heels off and ease her legs onto the couch so her ankles wouldn’t swell. Sometimes, especially on mornings when I could still smell the red wine on her, this would startle her out of an uneasy dream and she’d launch a swift kick toward my face. But I’m quick and could usually dodge her.

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If I woke up and realized she hadn’t come home at all—no loud TV, nothing in the freezer, no cash under the cat—I didn’t worry. This happened from time to time, and though she didn’t appreciate questions like “where were you last night?” and refused to answer them, she did always come back. That is, until she didn’t. Life went on as usual for a while. Tran came over after school, and after a few days of no freezer food and no dinner money, he started taking me home with him below Houston Street to eat. Tran’s parents and older brothers barely spoke English, so I just slurped up the noodles and broth his mom put in front of me and listened. I didn’t mind not under- standing anything. To me, they sounded like a flock of tropical birds calling to each other across the jungle. Once, after I had inhaled a plat- ter of pork and rice, Tran’s mom gestured at me and said something that sounded pointy like a stick. Tran didn’t want to tell me what she’d said, but his mom elbowed him in the ribs until he spoke. “She wants to know why she’s feeding you all the time,” he said, his mouth turning down in an embarrassed half smile. “She says she keeps feeding you but I always come home hungry from your house.” I didn’t know what to say. I only knew what not to say. “Tell her we’re poor,” I said. Tran told her this, but she just shook her head and gestured at the rest of the table. “She says we’re all poor,” Tran said. “If you want to eat here all the time, you have to work.” That put an end to the English lessons after school. Instead, as soon as three p.m. rolled around, we both headed down to Tran’s parents’ takeout restaurant, Pho Garden, where I’d take the English-speaking phone and counter orders and write them down carefully before passing them to Tran so he could write the orders in Vietnamese for his family cooking in back. Tran taught me how to keep track of the orders and then bag them for pickup or delivery by whichever one of Tran’s brothers was riding the bike that day. If delivery orders got backed up, Tran and I carried them on foot. But if that happened, his mom always sent us together, because once she’d sent Tran alone and the customer had taken the food and slammed the door in his face without paying. “She doesn’t think they’ll stiff a cute white kid,” he said before our first delivery, and it turns out she was right. Thanks to Pho Garden, I didn’t have to worry about going hungry, but I had plenty of other things to worry about. After Mom had been gone a week, and a visit to her studio turned up no sign of her, I used the

PMS.. 119 Rems restaurant phone to call around to some of the galleries and ask if anyone had seen her. “I think she said something about doing a residency upstate,” an assistant said at the third place I tried. “Is there something I can help you with?” I didn’t answer. I just quickly hung up before Tran’s mom noticed I hadn’t been taking an order. That was my first clue that Mom wasn’t coming back. The second was the postcard. “Greetings from the Great Smoky Mountains” it said in curvy red letters above a photo of a log cabin with smoke coming out the chimney. I flipped it over and noticed familiar handwriting, almost unreadable except for the dotted i’s and crossed t’s that gave the scrawl some meaning. “Hey Andy,” it started. “Your mom wants you to come stay with me for a while. I’ll send you a bus ticket after I finish this job. Keep an eye out for it. —Dad.” I imagined my dad—a lankier version of Paul Bunyan in flannel and denim—painting a forest of spruce firs on the wall of some Tennessee municipal building. I could barely remember his face, but I could always remember his brush strokes, since he had painted the whole ceiling above my bed with stars and comets and planets and flying saucers before he hit the road when I was eight. So that was that. I went to school, worked at the restaurant, did my homework with Tran while his mom packed up leftover rice for me, and sorted through the mail every day looking for the bus ticket. Now and then I’d have to field uncomfortable questions. Mrs. Epstein stopped me in the hall three weeks after Mom’s disappearance and mentioned she hadn’t seen her in a while. I said she’d been working a lot. When I brought in a forged signature on a permission slip for a field trip, Ms. Conway doubted that it was Mom’s handwriting. But after she left a few messages at Mom’s gallery and got no call back, she let the issue drop and I was able to go with the rest of the class to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I was yanked awake early in the morning a few times by loud banging on the front door. When this happened, I’d lie very still in bed and count the stars and planets on the ceiling until the intruder went away. When I finally did creep out of bed, I’d usually find a nasty note from Eddie, the super, under the door telling my mom the rent was way past due. On those days, I would peek through the peephole before leaving for school to make sure nobody was waiting with a summons or something in the hall.

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After a bunch of warnings, the electricity was cut off, and that’s when my stomach got bad again. I hated being in that dark apartment alone after dinner, but Tran thought moving me into his already super- crowded bedroom with his brothers would make his mom flip out. So instead, he wrangled me a flashlight and a jumbo pack of batteries from the basement of Pho Garden, and I started actually reading the books we were assigned for homework to pass the time till dawn. I especially liked a book Ms. Conway gave us called Julie of the Wolves, about this Eskimo orphan who gets married off at 13 and then runs away and gets adopted by a pack of wolves on the Alaskan tundra. Tran really liked it too, even though his brothers made fun of him for reading a book with a girl on the cover. “Joooooo-liiiiiiii, Jooooooo-liiiiiiii,” they’d call across the restaurant kitchen when their mom stepped out for a smoke break, and then they’d make an OK sign with one hand and stick a finger from the other hand in and out of the hole. Whenever my guts hurt at night, usually reading about Julie surviving on her own made my insides settle down. But as weeks went by and my situation got more complicated, nothing could stop the nasty-tasting acid from squirting up the back of my throat whenever I tried to lay down. One night, I got home from Pho Garden and there was an orange eviction sticker on my door and a chain wrapped around the doorknob with a big padlock on it so I couldn’t get in. Luckily, I’d been sleeping with the window open a little because I liked the sound of street noise, so I was able to get in through the fire escape. Instead of sleeping in my bed that night, I took my book to the couch so nobody would see my flashlight if they were looking up at my window from the street. My body started shivering all over, so I wrapped my mom’s old afghan around me and fell asleep sitting up with my Pro Wings on, in case I had to make a fast get- away. Four days later, the couch, the afghan, and even my trusty flashlight were gone. While I was at school, Eddie had cleared the entire place out and started repainting for the next tenant. I felt creepily numb when I saw that all my stuff had been chucked out. Even the fact that dad’s painting on my ceiling was now a blank square of rental-apartment white didn’t bother me. But when it finally dawned on me that I hadn’t gotten a single piece of mail since the eviction notice had been posted, I felt the same weird feeling I’d had the first time I rode the Cyclone at Coney Island. A big, lurching, stomach flipping dip.

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My window was nailed shut from the inside the next time I tried to climb in from the fire escape, so I crawled back down to the street. I’d already decided that if this ever happened, I would sleep in the school- yard of PS 15, so that’s where I was headed when I heard the tapping. At first it was really quiet, so I didn’t even bother to turn around. But when the noise got louder and more urgent, I looked up and saw movement on the other side of Mrs. Epstein’s window. She tapped and made weird motions with her hands and then tapped some more. When I just stood there, shaking my head because I didn’t understand, she struggled to heave her heavy window open and leaned her thick torso out toward me. “Andy!” she hissed, “get in here before somebody sees you. I’ve got something for you.” It was eerie using the main staircase after days of climbing the fire escape. Mrs. Epstein hustled me in, and this time, when she set a white dumpling on a saucer in front of me, I devoured it and asked for seconds. “You’re a hard man to find,” she said casually. “Eddie asked me if I knew where to forward your mail, and I said I would take care of it.” She shuffled over to a cabinet full of porcelain animals and opened up a drawer bursting with envelopes. Most of them had angry past due messages stamped across them in red, but one didn’t. It was thick and worn around the edges, and unlike the bills, this one had my name on it. Inside, there wasn’t just one bus ticket, but a few—enough to make all the connections between Port Authority and Richmond, Virginia. I spent that night on Mrs. Epstein’s sofa, and showered in her seashell bathroom the next morning, being careful not to leave my towel or any puddles on the floor. She made me an omelet filled with milk-softened crackers, and then I headed to school to say goodbye to Tran. When I told him I was leaving, he acted like it was no big deal. But when I decided to cut out early at lunch time, he told me he’d give me a lift to the bus station. We walked over to Pho Garden, and after a few minutes inside, Tran came back out with the keys to the delivery bike lock, and a big bag of Fresh Prince rolls for the bus. He climbed up onto the slightly-too-high bike seat and motioned for me to stand on the two rods sticking out on either side of the back wheel. I hopped on and grabbed Tran’s windbreaker to steady myself. “Cowabunga dude,” he called over his shoulder as he shoved off against the flow of downtown traffic. “Cowabunga dude,” I shouted back, and held on tight.

122 PMS.. Judith Teitelman

Guesthouse for Ganesha

Chapter One Esther Grünspan arrived in Köln with a hardened heart as her sole lug- gage. An uncommonly sweltering September day was her welcome, as well as a language that sounded like her native Yiddish, yet foreign in structure and comprehension. A formidable determination guided her actions. “Stantsye, ikh darf a stantsye. Lodging, I need lodging,” Esther demanded of the first person in uniform that crossed her path. “Vu ken ikh opzukhn stantsye? Where can I find lodging?” Her articulation was clear and direct, emphatic. Quizzical, the man’s eyes skimmed this plain- faced young woman from her faded, long-sleeved cotton frock with white rounded collar to her scuffed, lace up shoes. Small in stature with thick blond hair pulled away from her face in a tight bun, she was unadorned and clearly out of place. “Was? Ich verstehe Sie nicht! I don’t understand you,” he said, waving her away and pointing toward the train terminal. Without a note of thanks, Esther headed in the direction he indicated. Once inside the terminal, she strode through the cavernous building to consider every booth, kiosk and stand until she found a corner counter with a large sign overhead announcing “Informationen.” This was close enough to the Yiddish “informatsye” for Esther to push her way to the front of the line, disregarding the glares and loud protests of those in her way. She paid them no heed. Patience was no longer a part of her frame- work. It had been displaced by entitlement and self-preservation. The recent, devastating turn of events—Tadeusz’s action, his rejection—and such a public spurn—of her, of them, of all their plans—had shaped an impossibly conceived scenario. Esther’s one priority now was Esther. She repeated her request to the man behind the counter three times. Each time she enunciated every syllable more precisely, then more slowly but colored by rising frustration. The official, while clearly annoyed, noticed her youth and asked,

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“Wie alt sind Sie?” Alt? Esther thought quickly, alt—old. Just like in my language. Although the other words made no sense, she correctly assumed he was asking her age. “Zibitsn,” she said. The man shrugged his shoulders, rolled his eyes and turned to help the person next in line. Esther leaned over and grabbed the pen on his desk. In clear, thick lettering she wrote the numbers one and seven on her palm. Standing on the tips of her shoes, she stretched her left arm high and held it up close to his face. With a snort, he reached into a pile under his desk and thrust a piece of paper in Esther’s expectant hands. She looked intently at the page’s Gothic script and line drawing of a building. This must be a place for young people to stay, she deduced, for next to a name and address the numbers 16—22 were printed. A map of the area with a large X seemed to mark its location. Expressing no appreciation, Esther turned quickly, jostled the three people beside her, and ventured out into her first metropolis—a location as far away from all she had ever known as her meager resources enabled. A place with an assurance of anonymity and seclusion. If she could still muster gratitude for anything, it would be for this.

And in the only way anguish can be subdued, if not entirely vanquished, Esther never stopped moving during those first self-exiled months. She couldn’t. She could not allow herself to sit idle, not even for a few minutes, for if she did memories of him, of them, of what was, would deluge her mind. Emotions that she now strained to destroy or deny ever existed would take over and she would be rendered helpless, powerless, as she had been and as she promised herself she would never be again. She devoted her time to establish a formula for sustenance. Sewing was her foundation. While she strived to grasp the rudiments of German speech, her willpower propelled her to walk up and down the streets of Köln seeking work. She entered every dress boutique and tailor shop she could find with samples of her handiwork as calling cards. “Schauen Sie—Look!” She ordered those she met, holding up one of her tasteful blouses for inspection. The caliber of her skill and artistry supplanted language barriers.

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She was rewarded with small assignments from four tailors after just two weeks. Basic tasks—shortening a dress and repairing a pants cuff— were soon replaced by more complex responsibilities, for her mastery was revealed in the simplest exercise. Her stitches were precise, her hems and seams were even, and the presentation of each project was flawless. Stitching, basting, pleating, hemming, altering, darning, tucking, grading, embellishing, blocking, mending—these activities were second in nature only to breathing for Esther. Daily she sewed from the first hint of light to its last shadow to ensure her new clients received the quality work of which she alone was capable. No matter if her eyes burned, her neck strained or her fingers ached without respite. Here, in the windowless room cramped by a single bed, rickety table, rough wood chair and hot plate at the noisy, dilapidated youth hostel, Esther’s stoic nature took root—growing deeper and thicker by each day’s passing. She barely spoke, except as needed to secure a sewing assign- ment, purchase necessary supplies, or tell one of the other residents to quiet down. It was a raucous building, filled with too many young people, constant comings and goings, stair stompings, door slammings and shouting. For much of the day, with her focused concentration on work, she was able to ignore any distractions. But when she couldn’t, Esther found her nerves rattled, her posture tested. Such sounds were common to someone who had grown up in a home with 12 siblings. At these instances, she forbade the pent-up tears behind each eye to fall, and she quashed all but the most basic thoughts if one dared enter her head. After darkness fell, she spent the better part of the night trudging along the riverfront. In 1923, Köln was a chiaroscuro palette of grays and blacks with a few patches of deep brown or the darkest blue breaking through the visual monotony. Most structures housed three stories; a few had four or even five. Although some were stout like marshmallows and a handful of others were lean as poles, each was indistinguishable in design, color and pattern from its neighbor. Esther faded easily into this cityscape, apart from the occasional streetlamp illuminating her face’s stony glaze. On these walks Esther contemplated how long it would take the cold, fast-moving Rheine to swallow the torment that she, as yet, could not fully ignore. The memory refused to dissipate: every feather, overcast and edging stitch in her simple white dress, the posies in her hands, family and friends gathered in the town center, their excited chatter overlaid by

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Klezmer music as the musicians frolicked, and her, standing unaccompa- nied under their tenderly crafted chuppah. Waiting. Until too much time passed. Until she could no longer remain there—alone. Surely the weight of Tadeusz’s abandonment would supersede her ability to swim. Over successive evenings, Esther marked a route that covered six kilometers in total. Once established, her steps never varied, every evening the same. She always headed toward the river via Trankgasse near the Kölner Dom, the city’s glorious cathedral, and then crossed over Hohenzollern Bridge. When she reached its crown, water on either side, only sky above, Esther paused to relish the cool breeze of the river blow- ing on her face. One of the few joys she permitted herself. From there she went north where she plodded the full length of the cobblestone path that followed the Rheine’s left bank. Her movements were precise, not unlike her stitches. Each step she took landed in the exact center of the unvarying stones. A low, wrought iron fence ran the river’s expanse, providing a demarcation of choice. Her choice. To stay on one side or cross over to the other. At the furthermost edge of Rheinpark, the area defined by its thick row of uniform trees, Esther would stop, squeeze her eyes tight, inhale deeply—and consider. A few minutes might pass or just a handful of seconds. Inevitably the mantra “he cannot prevail, he will not prevail,” would resound in her thoughts. With a toss of her head, she would then turn around to retrace the course. Some nights she traversed this route twice, sometimes more. She moved steadily. Eyes most often directed downward with fixed attention on the patterned cobblestone. Esther never cared to look around to explore, for there was nothing of signifi- cance to see. At the close of the day after darkness reigned, her evenings unfolded exactly like the one before and the one that would follow.

Until— —the fourth of December, a bitter Friday twilight with the promise of snow nearly four months after Esther’s arrival in this city. It began like the others: Esther treading, once again, the familiar course that bordered the Rheine. However tonight her pace was limp. As she walked, she

126 PMS.. poemmemoirstory stretched, one arm extended long and high above her and then the other. She rounded her shoulders up and down and back and forth and rolled her head from side-to-side until her neck cracked. She pulled on each finger to extend the ligaments and when she reached the last digit she returned to the first. The weariness of her heart had been compounded by what had been a tedious day creating 10 flawless buttonholes on each of two dozen long-sleeved white shirts for the members of a youth band. She was lost in thought, eyes focused on her feet and the cobblestones, as she reviewed the deft movements she had taken to ensure every stitch’s identical length, when— Esther stopped abruptly. —she glanced up to take care she didn’t overstep the sharp curve in the path and saw, juxtaposed against Köln’s muddy landscape, streaks of luminous color burst through the trees barely 50 meters away. Like a beacon. “U va! Vos iz dos? What in the world is this?” Esther said out loud, startled. Quickly she looked around to see if anyone had heard her or saw what she saw. She was alone. Focused again on the phenomenon before her, she thought: I’ve not seen this before here, or anything like it—anywhere! Just ahead, in the grassy area near the north edge of Rheinpark, stood a small, poorly constructed wood stand. Its only defense against the open sky was a square canopy of fabric—a cacophony of vibrant, garish colors—supported by four thick poles at each corner. Tiny mirrors and tinted glass were stitched throughout this material, along with fringe, sequins, ribbons, tassels and beads. Utterly incongruous to the surrounding dim setting, this was a vision from a dream gone awry—a sight she could never have possibly conceived. Intoxicating smells—pungent, sweet, musty, sharp, woody, comforting—wafted from within the stand. Esther inhaled deeply. This bouquet impelled further exploration. She moved closer to peer inside and saw that the interior of the stand’s makeshift plywood walls was covered in a motley array of printed pictures of people—or were they people? Such strange characters! Perhaps these are images from a theatrical production taking place somewhere in the city, Esther mused. Or maybe a circus? Certainly nothing like this ever came through Przeworsk.

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Most of the images were of scantily dressed figures in bright colored sheer fabrics. Some had far too many hands and arms, one had too many heads, and one face possessed three eyes. There was a picture of a woman who was completely blue and an image that seemed more mon- key than man. Larger than the others was a rotund man with the head of an elephant. Both women and men were heavily made up, with most covered in strange elaborate jewelry. Many wore outrageous headdresses. Whether seated on one large, stuffed cushion or on an ornamented throne or standing in front of a glowing orange background, all were encircled by a variety of objects, some recognizable, others not—books, shells, musical instruments, candles, bowls, crescent moon, pillows, swords, snakes, fruit, flowers—too extensive and too confusing to register on first look. Esther’s eyes widened and she began to feel lightheaded. The lone man in the back of the booth smiled at her, exposing a stained, cracked front tooth. Thin, dark-skinned with thick black hair and a deeply angu- lar face, he also looked like no one she had seen before. In imprecise German with a peculiar accent, he asked: “Würde Sie, einen samosa mögen? Would you, a samosa, like?” Intrigued, though not knowing what he offered, she nodded, and he began to fry a small, doughy turnover. The strong smells that had originally lured her inside now overpowered the modest space. As Esther waited, she once again scanned the gallery of images that filled these crude walls. Truly an archive of the bizarre, they were at once compelling and absurd. Her eyes came to rest on the elephant-headed man. He, above the others, captivated her. Esther felt, in the oddest of ways, he was calling out, seeking her notice—demanding attention. This man’s— Is it even a man, Esther wondered? —large animal head and ears, wide mouth, four arms, broken left tusk and huge protruding belly bordered on the comical. His body, seated with one leg folded inward and the second resting on the ground, was loosely draped in sheer yellow and red fabrics. He held a highly wrought axe in his upper right hand and some type of flower in his upper left. Another hand held a thick rope, while the fourth was outstretched, its palm facing toward her. Esther inched closer and squinted. She observed that a mark, similar to a single cross stitch, but turned upright with short lines like flags on

128 PMS.. poemmemoirstory each end, was carved on his palm. A mouse staring at a tray that overflowed with what she thought were cookies, sat near his left foot. The scene was outlandish, but alluring nonetheless. Esther took a step backward to grasp this image full on and stared steadily into the elephant-headed man’s eyes. It was only a picture, this she understood; nevertheless she was struck by a gentleness and pro- found compassion. She descended into his eyes full on. Consciousness of time and space evanesced. A forgotten sense of warm, soothing calm wholly embraced her. All feelings of suffering and loss dissipated.

And...I...looked deeply back into her eyes...

In that penetrating gaze...I learned what had passed...and saw what was to come. Her life’s path could not be evaded...but I knew from this point onward we would travel together.

The man handed her the warm pastry, transporting Esther back to the stand. She began to nibble the savory treat filled with new tastes and impressions—she recognized potato and perhaps a pea—when an abrupt shudder coursed through her body as though a hidden switch had been flipped on at the core of her being. Her eyes began to water and she let out a quick breath. No doubt, she thought, from the heat of these unusual spices.

It was too soon.

She would not...no…could not understand...

I watched her walk away...and toward her future.

Back in her room at the youth hostel Esther could not oust the image of the elephant-headed man from her mind, nor could she escape the feeling he invoked within her. She paced back and forth between the bed

PMS.. 129 Teitelman and the chair. Three equal steps in either direction. She twisted her hair around her index finger and chewed on the inside of her right cheek. Normally after these evening walks to the riverfront, she would simply go to bed, exhausted from the day’s work. But this night sleep would not come. When she attempted to lie down or just sit, her legs would tremble as though they had somewhere to be. Oy, gevalt—Good grief, Esther thought. This is crazy—Meshuge! If I can’t sleep, I’ll work. That’s what I’ll do. There is much to get done, and I’m certain sewing will set me right. It always does. So though the light in the room was poor, she began the next day’s assignments and gathered needles, threads and fabrics. Esther first lined up the necessary materials as she did each morning: measuring tape, shears, pins, seam ripper and thimble. She matched the cloth with the proper thread, in thickness and color. Threading a blue strand in her milliner’s needle, Esther began to baste a pleated skirt. But the gathers kept bunching, so she put that project aside and turned to another. Then another. And then one more. Surprisingly, needle and thread were not able to bring composure. This had never occurred before. But all was not the same, something had shifted—of this Esther was sure. Yet, she was not capable of putting into words what that difference implied or what exactly had changed. For the first time since Esther had moved to Koln, she felt the need for someone—most especially one of her sisters—to talk to, to share what happened. To help her understand. “Am I going mad?” she said out loud. Questions overflowed— Why do I feel so strange? It’s like my head and body are no longer connected! What was that place? Those pictures? Did the stand even exist? Was my imagination playing tricks on me? I was overstrained from the day’s work after all. Perhaps it was some type of dreaming while being awake? All the while knowing she had had no dreams since leaving Przeworsk. It’s so very late now, really the middle of the night. Perhaps that’s why I can’t concentrate on any of my assignments, she ruminated. For even the most straightforward task, re-seaming a pair of men’s trousers and adding cuffs seemed beyond her abilities. She kept making mistakes. Repeatedly she pulled the stitches out and began the process anew. Her

130 PMS.. poemmemoirstory slender, normally dexterous hands would not stop shaking, her fingers refused to cooperate. “Nit vider—Not again!” Esther cried out, after the fifth time she pricked herself. “A chorbn—Disaster!” What is wrong with me, she wondered. This is crazy. Silly, silly me! After two and a half hours passed without progress, Esther put down her needles and thread. “Enough!” I must go back. I don’t know why, this makes no sense at all. I must revisit that place. Perhaps I need to return for no other reason than to assure myself that the stand and the experience were, without a doubt, real. For a second time that evening, she put on coat, hat, gloves, shoes and scarf and, at a swift pace, retraced the nearly three kilometers to the site of the stand. In the middle of the night, the riverfront was devoid of people, serene. Until Esther was close to 100 meters from the location she sought. From this distance she heard cries—screams—that became increasingly pronounced with each step forward. Moving as stealthily as possible, Esther ran to the edge of the nearby park and hid behind a tree. “Helfen Sie mir! Help me! Help me!” A male voice shouted, “Bitte! Please, please help me!” Esther’s body stiffened. Like stone. She could only watch as two Polizisten ferociously beat and kicked and pounded the same man who had so kindly offered her the doughy treat a few hours earlier. These supposed officers of the law shouted epithets at him, “Dreckiger Ausländer! Mistkerl! Arschloch!” “Geh’ zurück in deinen Dschungel! Go back to your jungle!” And they laughed and joked. Each goaded the other on. Esther had never witnessed such violence. While able to acknowledge the horror of what was taking place, she willed herself not to physically react. Honing stoicism served her well here, allowing her to smother compassion and the desire to shout out, to let the man know he was not alone. For to reveal herself would only bring peril to her and, likely, even worse to him. So Esther shut her eyes tightly and tuned out all sounds. Her mind traveled back to the evening’s earlier encounter and the sensations it invoked. This is the place she would like to remain. As the man lay on the ground, writhing and bleeding, one of the officers poured gasoline, lit a torch and set the stand ablaze—intensifying

PMS.. 131 Teitelman its color and vibrancy for a few moments until it, too, became black and gray and ash like the environment. Like all of Köln. Like Esther herself. Charred bits of fabric and pictures flew in the wind. All too soon, not a remnant remained—only a vision, a taste, and an enduring longing.

132 PMS.. Julie Stewart

By a Thread

The first time I called the Domestic Abuse Hotline, pretending to be concerned about a neighbor lady, the volunteer on the other end told me that the worst thing to do is tell her to leave Him. “Why?” I asked. “Abusers take away your identity.” She didn’t mean my identity. She meant the more general you, like when Julia Child says, then you take your chicken and place it ever so gently in the pan, breast side up. “An abused woman sees herself as he sees her. She cannot imagine surviving without him telling her who she is.” After I hung up the phone, I sat on the floor, next to my bucket of mop water, and wept. That was the day I started to record my life, so I could see who I was. We had just moved into the house, bringing along His promises to fix things up. I went through the boxes and dug out the movie camera we got when Isaac was born. I set it on the kitchen table under the window, pressed the button that made the little red light come on and went back to cleaning the kitchen. When I cleaned I lost myself completely. The smell of bleach calmed my nerves, burned my nostrils and kept me safe, as if a perfectly clean floor made it good as new. After I finished the video of me scrubbing the floor, I move on to the baseboards and the walls. I carried the camera into other rooms too, so that by the end of the day, I had footage of me washing dishes, wiping down the banister, making beds and dusting shelves onto which we would unpack our books. I wanted to look at myself from a point of view other than His. I thought maybe, I could help the woman I had become save herself.

Isaac laughed and sang-spoke, “Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie.” “Not blackbirds. Blackberries,” I corrected, laughing with him. Isaac Noah Stephenson, as his birth certificate read, is my son. It took

PMS.. 133 Stewart us days to settle on a name, until finally, the nurse came in my room and said if we wanted to be discharged, we had better decide what to call our little boy. In fact, I found out later, we could have left him unnamed for up to a year. That’s what the other moms told me, the same women who were appalled when they found out we had Isaac circumcised. It is strange how vulnerable we are. I had been so certain of myself before the birth, and here I was, only a few days later, being bullied into names and medical procedures. It’s not that I disliked the name Isaac. I just wasn’t as sure of it as He was. I was sure I wanted to breastfeed. I was sure that I wanted to have John Denver music playing in the delivery room. I was sure that I wanted my first meal after he was born to be vanilla ice cream, the good kind with dark flecks of seed, but He brought me chocolate from the cafeteria. “I wanted vanilla,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. “But chocolate tastes better.” “To you maybe, but not to me.” “Well, it’s too late now. I already got it.” I ate the chocolate. How long before that became my favorite flavor, before it was the only kind in the freezer, the kind I bought for Isaac’s first birthday, when my whole family came and stayed with us? Looking back, I wonder if anything about life is our choice. As sure as I was about vanilla ice cream, that is how sure I was that I wanted a baby, that I was ready to be a mother. What I know now is that life is as random as having two strangers decide what your name is and what your body will look like for the rest of your life, like they are casting roles and you get picked to play So-and-so. And so, Isaac Noah Stephenson it was. “Isaac, hand me that rolling pin.” The pie was for my husband. He worked at a salvage yard, though he was more involved in the tearing down of old barns and outbuildings, on farms that were being turned into subdivisions and strip malls, taking the parts and turning them into something new. “What about worm pie, Mommy? Can we make that?” “You mean like the dirt pie we have on your birthday?” “No, Worm Pie, with real worms, like the ones that come up out of the ground when it rains.” All boy, I thought, but I did not say it. “Sure, Isaac. Let me get my pie in the oven and then we’ll get yours started.” Chances were good that he would forget that promise and become

134 PMS.. poemmemoirstory interested in something else by that time. If not, what harm would there be in digging up a few worms, getting muddy, stomping in puddles? Those kind of messes can be cleaned up. Isaac circled the kitchen island while I rolled out the crust, turning back to the stovetop to stir the cooling berries, then back to smooth- ing the crust, crimping the edges into ruffles. I poured the contents of the pot over the pastry. Isaac came round my side of the island as I was bisecting the pie with the first strip of lattice crust. “Uh-oh, Mommy. You spilled.” I looked down at my feet. Bright purple splatters, like a Rorschach blot, on Noah’s freshly laid white tile. It had missed my foot by less than an inch. “I’m glad it didn’t land on your pretty toenails, Mommy. That would have burned you cause it’s hot, right?” “That’s right, Sweetie,” I said, though I would have taken that pain. “Hot like what’s in a witch’s pot, huh?” “Yes, that’s right.” “Boil, Boil, Toil and Trouble, is that right, Mommy?” “Yes, that’s right,” I said. I set the pot back down on the burner, careful not to drip anymore, though a few bruised berries clung to the side. I grabbed a thick yellow sponge from the sink and knelt down to wipe up the mess. The inky mixture shifted from floor to sponge, but a purple stain stayed put. Tossing the sponge back into the sink, I opened the cabinet and pulled out a spray bottle of cleaner with bleach. Bleach can clean up any mess, I thought, even blood. Isaac continued to circle the island, widening his arc around me and the fresh stain. I spritzed cleaner onto the tile and watched it settle into the grout, using the bottom corner of my old stained apron to blot at it. The dark lines remained, maybe even grew brighter. “I’ll let it soak for a few minutes,” I said out loud, to myself. Isaac had enlarged his circle into the dining room and was coming back to make a full figure eight. I unscrewed the cap, lifted the spray nozzle from the bottle, and poured a thin stream of cleaner onto the floor. It puddled, bubbles forming at its edges, and then seeped in. “What if I can’t get the stain up?” The phone rang. “Honey, let it go,” I called to Isaac. But he already had it in his hands, putting it up to his ear and mouth.

PMS.. 135 Stewart

“Hello?” I could hear His cheery voice. “Hi, Daddy. Guess what? Me and Mommy are making worm pie!” He sounds impressed, then asks if I am there. “Yes, she can talk. She is cleaning up a little mess.” Isaac delivered the phone to where I knelt beside the sink. “Hello?” “You aren’t really making worm pie, I hope.” “Of course not,” I said. “Blackberry. Your favorite.” “Okay. Good. He has an imagination, that kid. And sometimes you... y ou k n ow.” “Don’t worry,” I told Him, running my fingers across the slickened blue spot. “I’ll be home in an hour. I’m knocking off a little early, so I can seal that kitchen tile before dinner.” “Right now?” “Gotta get it done before anything ruins it.” I stared into the black spot, which stared back without flinching. “Babe, you there?” “I’m here,” I said. “I better get going though, if I’m going to be out of the way when you get here.” “That’s my girl.” I ended the call. My knee had started to shake by then, bumping the cabinet door against the frame with a clat-clat-clat, tapping out a message in Morse Code. The rhythm matched my heartbeat. If He had not yet sealed the floor, then the stain was permanent. Nothing could get rid of it, no amount of bleach or scrubbing. I had cleaned the whole house, mopped every floor, dusted the furniture and the baseboards, made the beds, vacuumed and swept and mopped, except in the kitchen, which I had saved for last, until after I slid the pie into the oven. Now, all that was left was damage control. First, I had to get Isaac down for his nap. He had plopped himself onto the couch to watch cartoons. The sound was turned down; figures ran and chased and punched each other in silence. His eyelids were heavy as he fought off sleep. “Isaac, let’s get you to bed, and when you wake up, we can dig for worms.”

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I scooped his small body, binding him to me, the way mothers do: one arm over his legs, the other under with a hand resting on his back. His legs had gotten so long this summer. His feet dangled past my edges instead of curled around my body the way they did when he was small. We walked up the carpeted steps. When I laid him down, he cried out, for just a moment or two, before he closed his eyes and pulled himself into a fetal position. When I stood up, I saw the video camera on top of his bureau, where I had last recorded myself. I picked it up, turned it so I could look into the little screen at the back, where I viewed a miniature version of myself, rocking Isaac to sleep, turned sideways in the chair to keep the pressure off my bruised ribs. A small version of me sat rocking and rocking, too small for me to make out if she was still crying, but if she was, it too was silent, like Isaac’s muted cartoons. The camera had not filmed what happened in our bedroom, Him shoving me out of bed, telling me to find another place to sleep. I turned off the camera and set it gently back on the shelf. I returned to the kitchen, my mind spinning with ways to get out of this.

The afternoon sun was shining through the windows when I heard His boots crunching across the driveway gravel. Twenty-seven steps from the tailgate of His truck, carrying His toolbox. Thud, thud, thud up the three wooden steps He built off the back door. Stomp, stomp, one for each boot to knock the dirt off His soles. Then He would bend over, undo the leather laces, loosening their grip on His ankles, then stand back up and use the toe of His left foot to push down the heel of the right boot, freeing His foot. He would do the same with the other boot. His key slid into the lock, a low grind of metal on metal before the Master lock turned to allow His entrance into the house. The door opened and He entered, pushing it closed with a socked foot and setting His tool belt down. The hammer claw caught on the arm of the wooden bench and dangled there. “Baby, you here?” He was loud, but not yelling. “Babe?”

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He took a step into the kitchen but did not see me, the marbled- topped island between us. “I’m here,” I answered, without standing up. He smiled, I bet, baring his teeth a little. You weren’t there, and there was no camera to show you, but if there was, you would see the sun streaming in through the panes of glass that He measured and fitted down both sides of the door. He stands between those rays, a silhouette, while I appear illuminated, the window light reflecting off the floor and into wisps of my pale hair. I’d spent the last hour bleaching and scrubbing, soaking the stain, hoping to lighten the dark place. I contemplated white paint, and, for a only a moment, considered blaming Isaac.

Maybe this upsets you, makes you question what kind of mother I am. You don’t know what He is capable of. Maybe you think I am over- reacting, the way I thought my mother did when she set a glass of water on the new dining room table one afternoon and hid the ring with a table runner, playing dumb when my father found it, acting like she had no idea how it got there. And really, up to this point, you have not seen any signs that he hits me, or pinches that soft place at the back of my neck while we are waving good-bye to my family at the front door. He has his arm around me. That’s all you would see. Perhaps He doesn’t kick me moments after the door shuts, and tell me to get my fat ass upstairs and clean up the mess they left. They probably screwed in that bed, he screams. Your mother is a whore just like you, He might add, kicking me again. You wouldn’t see the bruise, black as that stain on the kitchen floor. But if you were watching now, you would see me bracing for the pain, the memory of the last time still fresh and ripe as those berries. Or wrapping my arms around my body to protect a second baby that I do not even want, because if He finds out, He will want the baby, and I might remember how gentle He was while I carried Isaac, never once raising a fist or foot to me. And I might forget how He walked into the nursery, watched me lay newborn Isaac in the bed before shoving me down and pushing into me right there on the floor, while I tried not to scream and wake the baby. I might forget how He got up on his knees and buckled Himself back up, while I stayed curled up, knees to chest, gripping the wooden leg of the crib.

138 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

You didn’t see any of this. You want to put these pages down, because you don’t want to believe this was happening without anyone knowing. But you do believe me, and you are afraid. Compare your fear to mine. Resist the urge to turn away. Feel the fear of what is coming, and imagine that my fear must be ten times, maybe a hundred times bigger, because I will feel the pain while you will walk away unharmed.

I would walk away too if I could. I can only survive the next hour by slip- ping outside of myself and watching what happens as if I am watching myself recorded on a camera. I pretend that I am as distant as you. He walks down the hall to the bathroom, the unfinished bathroom which he always blames her for. He leaves the door open. She hears the sound of His piss in her clean toilet water. He walks back, entering the kitchen on sock feet. He rounds the island, sees the pie on the counter, sticks His finger in, breaking the lattice strips she has woven in and out across the top. He licks his finger. He stops when He sees her kneeling on the floor, her back to him. He sees her arms moving back and forth, piston-like, working at something. He comes closer, peers over her shoulder to see the purple lines, dark canals between the three tiles, which she has been able to reduce to a grayish tone. Finger still in His mouth, He does not move. His jaw muscles tighten. It appears He may bite off His own digit. Shit, Goddam it, that tile was special order, from a customer who changed her mind and decided on blue. He’s not even sure He can get it anymore. She stays in her place, her eyes darting back and forth, decid- ing whether to move and make Him chase her or prostrate herself, let Him see her on her knees, working at the stain. She stays knelt on the hard floor, bends almost into child’s pose. “Please, wait, let me explain, I’ve been trying to get it up all afternoon, after you said you hadn’t sealed it yet,” she says. “So this is my fault?” “No, no, I didn’t mean that. I’m trying to tell you how it happened.” “You lied to me?” “No. No.” “You didn’t say anything about this when I called. If you had told me then, I could have come right home. Now this has penetrated all the way

PMS.. 139 Stewart through. There’s nothing I can do to fix it. Nothing except to start over, rip the whole damn thing up.” He reaches for her shirt and pulls her up to standing by the neck of it. Then he shoves her back down. “Get out of my kitchen,” He says, although He still has hold of her shirt. He kicks her buttocks, so her lower half pushes forward while the fabric of her shirt pulls at her airway and His hand keeps her head close enough that His breathing rustles the hairs at the back of her neck. He puts His left hand against the small of her back, so she cannot turn around, and pushes her forward. Her hip bone knocks into one corner of the marble countertop. At the doorway, He lets go of her neck and shoves her onto the hallway floor, where she spills into the pool of sunlight. She stays there, for now. He turns back to His floor. He takes a steak knife from the drawer. My imaginary camera stays on her, but you can hear Him scraping the knife into the grout, gently, bit by bit, so He can lift the tile out of its place. Right now, He cares more about the tile than about punishing her. He can get to her later. I hear him muttering to himself on the other side of the island. I pull myself upright. I have to do something to keep myself in my body. I don’t want to disappear again. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave my little boy. I put my hand to my throat, breathe in and out, let my hand rise and fall with the intake of air. The skin hurts, but I am grateful for this. I want to feel this pain. It is mine. I stand up and look into the kitchen. I won’t let him do this to her anymore. She can not take much more. I have to help her. I will not watch him hurt her again. I will wrap myself around and lasso her to me.

I moved toward the doorway, leaned my arm on the wooden frame. My bare feet moved across the tile until I was close enough to see his head on the other side. He was talking to himself, muttering words I could not hear. Still, as the sound of his voice, I felt the thread that kept me there spooling out, losing its tension. The steak knife was on the counter, beside my empty bottle of bleach. I made myself pick up the knife. I held it in my hand; he stood up. “I told you to stay out of my kitchen.”

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The sound of his voice threatened to unravel me. I had to stay right there, so I put my hand down and put it to the skin of my forearm, pulled it across. Blood rose up, a thin red line, rising up until it overflowed and ran down my arm and dripped onto the counter. “What the hell are you doing?” He took a step toward me. I could tell he was worried about what I would do. I pushed the knife in again, deeper this time, and the blood ran faster. I turned from the island, like a castaway on a flimsy raft, my arm reaching out to him. One fat drop filled up until it pulled away from my skin. It splattered onto his white tile. He looked at it, unsure of what to do. I made one last cut, turning my hand over and running the knife across my palm. I straightened my arm, let the blood fall to the floor, squeezing my hand into a fist. The blood forced itself out from between my fingers, running to the tips, faster now, spilling onto his bleached tiles, falling one on top of another, so close together that the drops of blood merged and became larger. He did not move. I stayed there too, the thread that held me to myself growing tighter and stronger.

PMS.. 141 Yellena Urazbaeva

The Gospel According to the Mother

—for my mother

Maria was born on a boat. When the fog settled, her mother, damp from the waves and tears, was holding a baby girl in her arms. She dipped her sleeve in the cold gray of the seawater, and wiped Maria’s squirming body with it. She knew her little girl’s name, but remained silent, and stared at the furrowed frowning face in her lap. The baby, wrapped in an old flannel shirt, turned away from her mother’s nipple, hard from the morning cold, and continued to scream. Her mother squeezed a cloudy drop of the first milk onto her daughter’s open lips, and Maria clung to the exposed breast, making their now external connection complete. Maria’s father did not say anything either, but took a gold locket off his neck and put it on his daughter’s chest. The baby stirred and stretched her arms from under the shirt. Draping the locket over Maria’s head, her mother smiled for the first time since her labor began. The smell of the fish from the boat floor mixed with the sweet and nauseating smell of rotting flesh. Maria’s father rolled the placenta into a bloody rag and threw it overboard. Holding back tears, he grabbed the oars and steered the boat toward the now visible shoreline. The rag opened and floated on the surface, undulating to the rhythm of the waves, away, into the open sea. By coming early into the world, Maria had thwarted her parents’ doomed escape to Turkey, and might have saved their lives.

The village where Maria grew up was near a resort town on the Black Sea. The gentle sloping hills that stayed green most of the year embraced the shore and cradled the villages around the water. The people here either worked the land, or catered to the summer vacationers from the North. Most of Maria’s neighbors were Abkhaz, but there were also Georgians, Armenians, Russians, Greeks and even Turks. Before he disappeared, Maria’s Greek father used to drive a bus along the shore

142 PMS.. poemmemoirstory between Gagra and Sukhumi. Maria’s Russian mother worked as a hair- dresser in Gagra and took an earlier bus along the same route. They would have never met, living parallel to each other, perpetually separated by ten minutes, if one morning Maria’s mother didn’t stumble and break the heel off her only good shoes. As she hobbled to the corner, her bus pulled out, leaving behind a cloud of dust and diesel exhaust. She was sitting on a large rock, sobbing and cursing, when Maria’s future father brought his bus to a halt in front of her. Maria knew nothing else about that time, but it seemed that fate had brought them together for a brief moment in life for the sole purpose of conceiving her. No one knew where her father came from, or where he went after Maria was born. The time when her mother delivered Maria on the rickety little boat in the open sea was the last her parents saw of each other. Maria grew up looking at the picture of a handsome stranger with a sad droopy mustache that her mother had pinned to the wall above her bed as if he were not her father, but her guardian angel. The locket, his only gift to Maria, contained a lock of his black hair, his baby picture and a photo of his mother, a somber-looking woman with a long nose, dark eyes, and a severe expression on her thin lips. Maria’s mother liked to say that women in Colchis used to be the most beautiful in the world, but now only their arrogance remained. “We don’t have the airs or the looks, but we are fun!” her mother would laugh, prancing around in a tight-fitting dress. But Maria was not like her mother at all. She was not unhappy, but lacked the lightness of spirit her mother seemed to have. Maria often climbed on a chair in front of the mirror, and compared her own reflection to her grandmother’s photograph in the locket. Her nose, which her mother called classical, was as long and straight as her grandmother’s, but her hair was limp and dirty blond, similar to her mother’s before she had dyed hers peroxide-blond. It lacked both luster and weight, and seemed to be temporarily pinned to Maria’s head, threatening to fly off with any substantial gust of wind. Her eyes, although dark brown and almond-shaped, a replica of her father’s, didn’t look fierce or languid, just large and dazed, almost too large, as if she were lost in the world like a lonely cow in a field of grass. This lack of expression also made her look content, which irritated neighbors and teachers when they tried to lec- ture her about life’s inequities. Maria’s arms grew long and elegant out of her soft sloping shoulders, and her small shapely breasts made a graceful

PMS.. 143 Urazbaeva transition to a surprisingly flat and muscular belly. Her waist was slim and supple before it cascaded into her large hips and thighs, which had a peasant sturdiness, and made her look grounded. It was as if a delicate marble sculpture were placed on top of a rough granite rock, her body divided, like her blood, into Greek and Russian.

Maria and her mother lived in a little shack of a house. Their windows opened onto a modest garden, and in the summer Maria could touch the broken cups of the magnolia flowers right from her bed. The fragrance of the smoky mountain nights and the pungent salty air mixed with the aro- mas of jasmine and magnolias called her outside, somewhere, anywhere, but Maria stayed as if waiting for something, a sign or a gift. The beach was a short walk from their home, and sometimes Maria would climb onto the roof and sit there watching the sea and the boats. From there, the water looked almost still, like a painting. She rarely walked on the beach, only when she had to, and never stepped into the water. Maria wouldn’t share it with anyone, but the immensity of the sea, its constant change in color and temper, overwhelmed her. This expanse was beyond her comprehension. She wasn’t afraid; it just wasn’t something she was ready to do. Her mother found it strange, like many other things she found strange in her quiet reticent daughter. Once when Maria was six or seven, they walked together along the beach, under the pine trees. The sun was in its zenith, scorching the long needles and the pebbles underneath their feet despite the shade. Maria could feel the heat rise through the soles of her sandals. “Good thing we don’t live in the desert. I hear people fry eggs on the rocks there, that’s how hot it is,” said Maria’s mother and wiped the running sweat off her face with her forearm. “I feel like a frying egg myself.” They stopped and stared at the empty beach. Most vacationers were taking a nap, and the locals rarely came out during the day. The low waves kept coming, without menace, as if licking the pebbles exhausted from the heat. Maria’s mother dropped her purse in the shade. “Run,” she exclaimed, and tugged her daughter along toward the water. Before Maria had time to think, they plunged in, fully dressed. The shock of the cold water pierced her body and made her stumble. She scrambled towards the shore, screaming and pushing away from her mother who grabbed Maria’s foot under the waves, trying to hold her back. Maria fell and, swallowing salty water, crawled to the shore, leaving

144 PMS.. poemmemoirstory the sandal behind in her mother’s hand. “Come back, you silly girl! I’ll teach you how to swim.” Her mother frolicked in the waves demonstrating how much fun the sea could be on a hot summer day. Her dress billowed around her in a floral safety ring. Maria’s hair and clothes stuck to her body and made her feel naked and heavy. She wanted to cry, but she stared at her mother in defiance, and stood there, stubbornly burning her bare foot on the pebbles. And so Maria’s willful nature was unexpectedly revealed, like a glimpse of a woman’s face from under a chador, the black cloth they used to wear in parts of this rugged and lush country.

On holidays, many village families gathered together for a big celebra- tion, but most nights, when Maria was done with her homework, she and her mother sat in their stiff chairs, side by side, and watched an old black-and-white TV. The Moscow station occasionally showed movies where actors struggled through a blizzard. “Oy! Look!” Maria’s mother cried. “That’s exactly right! Up to your knees in snow! You’ve no idea… Freezing and dark all the time. We’re lucky we live in the south.” But Maria wanted to know what snow felt like, and would plunge onto the bed over the soft Siberian pillow that her mother had brought with her from the north.

The neighbors knew each other well and mostly got along, but every summer the town would burst with gossip, provoked by the plague of illicit romance during the tourist season. Every little transgression by the local husbands with the vacationing city girls was noted and scored by the women, and would often culminate in a yelling match over a fence or across a mound of freshly picked tobacco leaves as the women settled on the ground to string them for drying. But come fall, the villagers put away their grudges. They depended on each other, and that was why Maria’s mother refused to move to the city. The Abkhaz family that lived next door had six children, all of them boys. Sometimes, when Maria walked with a bucket full of still warm milk for sale, she would catch a glimpse of the three older boys, smoking thick cigarettes they had rolled up from old newspaper scraps behind the tobacco-drying shack. She pretended not to notice them, and hurried

PMS.. 145 Urazbaeva along to the bus stop, spilling milk over her tan calves, as they laughed and pushed each other, yelling in Abkhaz. Their mother often came by for a haircut, complaining that God hadn’t sent her a daughter with whom she could share her secrets later in life. She would laugh covering her mouth full of gold teeth, as Maria’s mother played with her hair in front of the mirror. She could look younger if she had her hair tinted and cut short, but she inevitably asked for a trim, and rolled up her char-colored hair with silver filaments under the black scarf she always wore. Ripsime and Ashot, an old Armenian couple, lived in a large house on the left. Their two sons had grown and moved to different cities. They sent their children to the village for a few weeks every summer, but the ten-room house was mostly for rent. Ripsime and Ashot lived in one room on the first floor across the yard from the kitchen. The toilets and the summer shower were also outside. Only apartment buildings in the nearby town had bathrooms inside, but Ashot always cursed the idiocy of emptying one’s bowels where one slept and ate. Maria knew the geography of their home very well, because she often helped old Ripsime with her chores in exchange for food. They were kind to her, perhaps missing having a family. They might have had lodgers for the same reason and not for the money at all. How much did two old people really need? Ripsime’s back wouldn’t allow her to stand straight anymore, and her torso moved parallel to the ground, as if she were picking weeds in the vegetable garden. Her hands were black from tobacco juice, and her fingers were rough and crooked like the roots of the old tree that threatened to overturn the shed in the back of the yard. It was not clear how old they were, because Ashot still looked strong and handsome, although his face bore deep haphazard furrows, and his skin was leather-tough and permanently tanned. He always dressed in a suit, and an enormous round cap, flat on top, that Maria’s mother nicknamed his helicopter patch.

When Maria turned fourteen, Ripsime taught her to milk the cow. She loved the skill it required, the early hour, and the communion with this large, warm, and complacent animal. Perhaps, that was the time when her own story really began, instead of her playing a part in her mother’s story.

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Maria got up at dawn, and walked down the dusty path that connected the two houses. She opened the creaky wooden gate and re-wrapped the rope that kept the gate closed. In the shed, Maria picked up a tin bucket and rinsed it in the center of the yard. The water from the pump was ice-cold and sprayed her hands and feet, making her gasp. The dog that had slept on a rag by the kitchen door ran across the yard to greet her. It licked Maria’s wet calves, tickling her with its warm sandpaper tongue. Maria reached for a dark clump of low-hanging grapes above her head. Stretched across the ropes strung between the kitchen and the house, the grapevines provided shade in the yard. She broke off a few purple beads, and put them in her mouth. They broke releasing the tangy liquid sweetness. The grapes were ready, and soon Ashot and his grand- sons from the city would pick and crush them to make wine. Ripsime could be heard banging pots and pans in the kitchen, and the smell of polenta porridge seeped through the open doors. Ashot was washing at the open sink in the back of the yard, gargling, splashing and coughing up morning phlegm. Maria stopped to inhale the scent of heather soap, but remembered that soon all cows and sheep would be gathered for pasture, and rushed to the shed that held Ripsime’s cow and dirty-white sheep. She pulled a wooden stool and patted the cow on the side to make her presence known. The cow turned its large head toward Maria, whipped its sides with the tail to scare the flies and mooed. “Shhh,” said Maria, and gently rubbed the cow’s brown hide a few more times before sitting down on the stool. She wiped the pink-and-black udder with a wet rag and placed the bucket underneath. The cow stood still, familiar with the ritual. The weight of the stretched flesh filled with milk, the warmth of the white drops on her fingers, the patient rhythm of pulling the large rough nipples and its tandem spurts hitting the tin bucket calmed Maria. She pressed her head against the cow’s hide, and closed her eyes. Her hands, like the hands of a lace maker, manipulated the four supple shafts in a coordinated pattern. A rooster sang its morning song, and birds chirped over the vegetable garden, overriding the buzzing of flies and bees. A breeze brought the salty scent of the sea, and a child’s laughter mixed with words in Armenian she did not understand. For a moment, all the sounds, scents,

PMS.. 147 Urazbaeva and movements came into one, and Maria felt part of this enormous incomprehensible unity.

She was finishing up, when Timur, the eldest son of their Abkhaz neighbor, opened the shed and shooed out the noisy, reluctant sheep. He had already gathered the cattle from all the houses in their street and was ready to take them to the hills for the day. “Opah, Dunya!” he yelled and slapped the cow on the bony rump. “Opah, Opah!” He clapped his hands and whistled. Maria stepped out of the way holding on to the milk bucket. The animals were gone, but Timur lin- gered at the gate. He stared at Maria’s small round breasts, and down the line of buttons on her dress, all the way below her belly button. She felt her face and chest burn, and she could not breathe. She cleared her throat with a strange, unfamiliar sound. “Opah, Maria!’ he clapped his hands again, and laughed running after the herd.

Maria slowly walked across the vegetable garden toward the yard. The bucket was heavy, and she took care not to spill any milk. A panting dog suddenly appeared on her path, and froze as if caught. Maria stopped too, and watched the dog, concerned for the milk. The dog sat back wag- ging its tongue. Maria suddenly noticed something she had never seen before. A smooth crimson member shone in the bright light like a dagger dipped in blood. It extracted and retreated into its furry sheath between the dog’s legs. Maria was stunned and the bucket slipped out of her sweaty palms. It hit the rock with a heavy thud and flipped, spilling the milk. The thirsty soil immediately drank up the liquid. The dog lapped the last drops mixed with dust, and scurried away. Maria bit her hand, and tears filled her eyes. She felt assaulted, ashamed, and confused. Ripsime shuffled toward her, drawn by the noise. “Tzavet tanim! No cry,” she waved her arthritic hand in dismissal, and picked up the bucket. She spoke four languages, but her Russian was poor. “He,” she pointed to the sky. “He decide milk or no milk today.” Ripsime crossed herself, and Maria, unable to utter even a simple apology, buried her face in the old woman’s sweaty shoulder, brown from the constant beating of the sun.

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Yosif entered their lives unexpectedly, and as far as Maria was concerned, needlessly. He was named after Stalin, because he was born somewhere near Gori just like his beloved leader. “Most first-born boys in the village were called Yosif that year,” he told them later, ladling the soup at their kitchen table. He brought his family, a wife and two sons, on vacation from Sukhumi. There were just as many beaches in Sukhumi, but it was a city and it was home. They wanted something more rustic. And an outhouse was certainly as rustic as it got. Yosif took the two large rooms upstairs in Ripsime and Ashot’s house. The old owner gave them a discount, because Yosif worked for the Sukhumi Militia, and it was good to know people in high places. For the first night, Yosif bought a small lamb at the market, and tied it to a pole in the yard by the kitchen. It frolicked around the pole and grazed from the pail, occasionally kicking its cracked enamel sides, and pushing it along the asphalt with a loud hollow bang and screech. At sunset, Timur held down the bleating animal, and Ashot took a large sharp knife and slit the lamb’s neck in one smooth stroke, as if cutting a slice of bread. Blood gorged out of the thin wound over the dirty- white curls, onto the ground and down the gutter. The animal shook, kicking its legs a few more times and sagged into the men’s arms. Ashot dragged the limp body to a patch of sand to finish the preparation. Lambs were often slaughtered in the village, but Maria had never watched it before. She stood by the side of the shed, transfixed. She didn’t even scream, because that line, the change from life to death was so swift and lithe, she lacked the ability to claim it real. At night, the lamb was roasted over a pit on the beach. The neighbor’s boys rotated the spit that pierced the animal from head to tail, and bright red sparks flew into the air against the dark sea and sky joining the stars. All the lodgers and neighbors were invited to the feast. And that was how Maria’s mother met Yosif. He reminded her of Maria’s father: he was just as dark, and had a droopy mustache. Maria noticed her mother exchange glances with Yosif across the long table outside, and blushed. One toast led to another. A t’amada, a toast maker, ruled the table in this part of the world, and Yosif was at ease with his ancestors’ tradition. More wine was brought from the cellar, and the three Georgian vacationers stood up and sang a folk song, then drank from a large ram’s horn, one after the other, turning it upside-down to show there was nothing left at the bottom. The city boys hid their smiles.

PMS.. 149 Urazbaeva

“I want to drink to our fertile land,” said Yosif standing up again. “To Georgia.” “This is Abhkazia,” quietly said one of the neighbors. “Don’t be a grouch. Abhkazia is part of Georgia, just like my Abkhaz wife is part of me.” “For n ow.” “Forever,” insisted Yosif, his voice gaining the stern notes of a public official. “To friendship and peace,” said Ashot. “To our Caucasian motherland and hospitality.” “An Armenian is always a diplomat,” laughed Yosif, relieved. The host smiled back, but it seemed forced. “Let’s drink to our women then,” proposed Yosif, barely standing from all the wine. “Don’t forget that we’re in the land of the Golden Fleece, and women here hold all the strings! Medea was from Kutaisi. She made Jason, and destroyed him. To my wife, may she forgive my shortcom- ings, and to all the lovely women at the table. Young and old. Georgian, Abkhaz, Russian, Armenian, Greek. Whoever they might be, they are our joy and solace, and our pillar at times of uncertainty.” “I’ll drink to that,” the Abkhaz man stood up, followed by the rest of the men. Ashot emptied his glass, and made a discreet sign to his wife to start clearing the table. Maria watched her mother and Yosif click their glasses and lock their eyes for a brief moment.

That night, Maria heard rustling and whimpers outside her window. She put her head to the door, then stepped outside, and saw Yosif and her mother standing by the side of the house in the dark. Maria didn’t hear them again, but every night after that, her mother came to bed after midnight. Maria sat alone in front of an open window, all the lights extinguished except for the light of the moon streaming from across the sea. She brushed her long thin hair, slowly, one stroke at a time, as if composing a story, sentence by sentence. Then, she tied it into a tight round knot above the back of her neck, and climbed into the cold bed with starched sheets. Waiting for her mother to return, she imagined Yosif’s wife, awake in the rented rooms, also waiting, and her loneliness lifted and floated over her as if on the way to join all other loneliness.

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Yosif and his family left, but a few months later Maria’s mother claimed to have some business in Gagra and stayed away for the night. When she came back, she brought a brand-new color TV. Maria’s mother immediately turned it on, playing with the antenna. When the image finally came through, they both laughed at the excitement of seeing the world out there in color, regardless of the streaking and the prevalence of red. The news showed crowds of people climbing over a wall, breaking it with hammers, smashing bottles of champagne against it. The sound finally joined the pictures and announced that the Cold War was over and the Berlin Wall was no more. Maria’s mother started to cry. “It’s a new world, kotik,” she repeated, choking on her tears. “A new happy world, my little kitten.” Maria wanted to believe it, but the tears confused her. After that time, Maria’s mother stayed in Gagra overnight every month, and returned either with new dresses for both of them or with some extra money that she hid in the sock drawer. She was happy and looked younger. Maria was glad and ashamed at the same time. Ripsime looked at Maria with pity, and she worked harder, trying to wash away the shame.

One day, while cleaning the house, Maria’s mother bent over to scrub the floors and felt faint. “I’ll lie down for a minute,” she told Maria. “My head is spinning.” Maria picked up the soapy rag, letting her mother rest. Night came, but her mother kept sleeping. When Maria woke up the next morning to go to school, her mother was still in bed, and didn’t make her breakfast. Maria quietly left, trying not to disturb her. In the afternoon, when she returned, she found her mother in the same position under the covers, peacefully resting her head, propped up by the large Siberian pillow. Maria gently touched her mother’s shoulder, but she didn’t stir, and her body felt stiff and cold. Maria shook her, trying to jolt her out of the slumber, but instead the body tilted and fell on the side without waking up. Maria stared at her mother who looked like a large abandoned doll, and knew she was alone now. She brought the body into the half-sitting position she had found it in, climbed into bed with her mother, and pulled up the covers. They had not embraced or come into any physical contact with each other for a long time, and Maria couldn’t remember the last time they had bathed or slept together. She took her mother’s arm and draped it over her

PMS.. 151 Urazbaeva shoulder, and clung to the hard cold body, digging her bare feet into the feathery mattress underneath. The blanket was warm, and soon Maria fell asleep. In the morning, she cut off a strand of her mother’s dry peroxide- blond hair and put it in her locket where it joined her father’s black curl, as if they were finally reunited. She didn’t know if her father was still alive, but it seemed unimportant. Old Ripsime and Ashot shuffled over to Maria’s house, and helped her prepare for the funeral. Maria looked at her mother’s naked body on their dining table, and didn’t recognize her. The cold rubber of her skin, and the austere alien expression on her still face made Maria wonder what it had to do with her agile and vivacious mother. They dug a grave in the back of the house, under a large cypress, because Ashot said it wasn’t safe to travel to the cemetery any more. It was hard to believe, but this beautiful land was at war. Some roads and buildings were booby-trapped, and mines were randomly scattered throughout the countryside. Ripsime, her voice trembling, sang an Armenian song. Maria couldn’t understand the words, but it was long and sad, and seemed appropriate. She didn’t know how to sing, and didn’t know what to say. Ashot took his round cap off, and crossed himself. Old Ripsime said a prayer, and a few male neighbors who ventured outside their houses, lowered the plain plywood coffin into the ground. Maria picked up the spade and shoveled the dusty earth into the grave. The hollow sound of soil against wood reminded her of the milk from the udder hitting the side of an empty tin bucket, and she settled into a steady rhythm until she was done. At night, in her dream, Maria became really small, so small that she could fit on the back of a dove, the white dove that had soared off her neighbor’s roof frightened by distant shots. She held on to its smooth pale feathers, pressed her face against its damp soft neck, and floated in the sky, in the bright blue sky, over the village and the sea. And her mother, down below, turned and waved to her before getting on the bus.

Soon after the Abkhaz government announced its independence from Georgia, empty busses and cars stalled for lack of gasoline on the road that had brought Maria’s parents together. Tourists who used to be the main sustenance in the region stayed away, and the coast plunged into a permanent off-season lethargy. There was nothing to do and nowhere

152 PMS.. poemmemoirstory to go. Most nights, Maria watched the color TV at home, eating sheep cheese that old Ripsime gave her for the work. She learned most of the news on television or from old Ripsime, who was happy her children were far away. Sometimes, they could hear the explosions, and see the burning smoke rise from the southern shore. Even families split up along ethnic lines in this war, and thousands fled north, to Russia, or east, to Georgia, on the last trains and planes to leave the area. Now, the only way to leave was on foot. Maria had nowhere to run. Gagra was as far now as Siberia. She sometimes thought of her mother’s family up north, but she didn’t know them or where they were. Would they even care to help her? She hadn’t heard from them, but then again, they didn’t know that her mother had died. She tried to imagine walking through snow. She never asked her mother if snow had any taste, or if its crunch under one’s feet sounded like that of the pebbles on the beach outside. Her mother had promised to take her north, but it was too late now. The village was still safe, and no one had killed anyone yet, but the wind was growing thick with anger and fear. Blood was in the air, and people stayed close to home, afraid to stray far onto the road or the beach. One day, Maria had walked up the hill, afraid of the booby-traps, but too tired of being at home and speaking to no one but Ripsime. “How come you’re not scared?” asked Timur. Maria shrugged. They sat on the arid grass, side by side. The village and the sea spread beneath them in poster-perfect greens, yellows and blues, like pistachio nuts on an aquamarine plate. The air was clear and thin, but the damp November chill was already creeping from the mountains. “Look,” Timur pointed at the smoke on the horizon. “Soon Sukhum will be ours.” They remained quiet for a while. “If it isn’t, I’ll run away and join the rebels,” he added and jumped on his feet. “Come, I’ll show you something.” He took out a small transistor radio, and turned it on. The static poured at full volume. Maria watched him slowly turn, directing the antenna, trying to get reception. Finally, “She loves you, yeah, yeah, y e a h …” spurted out of the radio. Timur’s face widened into a sly smile. The static swallowed the sound again, but there was hope for more now. “Come, I’ll teach you to dance rock-’n’-roll.”

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They stood on the slope of the hill surrounded by sheep, and shook their hips, and waved their arms above their heads, sometimes to the music from the other end of the world, and sometimes to the static, keeping the memory of the music in their bodies. Timur grabbed Maria’s hand and pulled her up the hill to a small crevice where the two hills met. The grass was burnt and straw-like under their feet, and the bushes were dry and dusty, exhausted from the relentless heat of past summer. Maria could hear the gushing water from down below, struggling through the jagged rocks on its way to the sea. Timur pressed her against the cold rock. “You’re beautiful, Maria. Even though you’re not Abkhaz,” he smiled, and kissed her on the lips. Maria shivered. “Do you know what I’m doing?” he asked as he fumbled with his belt. Maria shrugged. The world seemed immense from this mountain and they were so small, hiding behind the rock wall. She was afraid, afraid of Timur but, even more so, of the world, of the unpredictable pain that it was certain to inflict upon her. “I’ll teach you everything today,” Timur laughed. The echo picked up his laughter and carried it across the mountains, mixing in discord with Maria’s no-o-o-o, repeating again and again, as if the whole world was denying laughter from now on. Maria pushed him away with all her strength, but couldn’t get away, pressed against the rock. Suddenly, Timur shoved Maria aside, into the dry prickly thicket and ran toward the flock on the slopes, pulling up his pants on the way. Maria struggled to her feet, scratching her ankle on the dry needles of the shrub. She watched him stumble and roll, yelling something in Abkhaz, until he landed next to a sheep that was lying on the ground by the bushes, away from the rest of the peacefully grazing herd. The ewe was shaking, jerking its hind legs, and intermittently bearing down, then lying on its side again. A pool of red and yellow fluid that had gushed from the animal tinted the ground and the arid grass underneath it. Timur rolled up his sleeves, and put his left hand on the animal’s expanded belly, caressing it, then slipped his right arm inside the bloodied body. Maria felt a wave of nausea rise inside her, and she had to turn away. When she looked again, the ewe had crawled away, bleating, and Timur was sitting on the ground, staring at a red and yellow lamb in

154 PMS.. poemmemoirstory front of him. The lamb didn’t move, its wet body shining in the sun, and its small thin legs lifeless like the dry sticks by the hill. Maria waited, not knowing what to do. “I’m sorry,” she finally uttered. “Ahh!!!” Timur grabbed a handful of dusty earth with his bloodied hands, and threw it at Maria. The dust crumbled at her feet. “You’re cursed!” he continued to scream. “Never come near me again! Whore! Russian whore!”

A week later, Maria heard a scream from the street that extended and retreated like a rock tied to an elastic. Then all sounds seemed to die, except for the wind rustling in the tree crowns. She ran outside. Her heart was beating hard, pounding from her calves to her temples, jumping out of her chest. A muffled explosion shook the ground, and taupe clouds that reminded her of the shaggy sheep slowly floated toward the mountain. Ashot blocked her way, catching her in mid-flight as if she were a fire- fly, gently, carefully. He pressed her head to his dusty jacket that smelled of tobacco. “Shhhh, go home.” Another wave of screams and weeping came from the house next door. Maria looked at Ashot. He nodded, letting go of her. Maria didn’t move, hanging on his sleeve like a child. “They found Timur this morning. A mine. The sheep are all there, and... Go home. There’s nothing to see. The women are there.” Maria stepped back. She didn’t wish Timur any harm. She knew what he did to her was wrong, but she had forgiven him. People had to forgive each other to continue, to go on living. No, it wasn’t her fault. She pushed Ashot away, backing into the neighbor’s fence. Ashot took off his round cap, wiped his face with it, and crossed himself. “God help us.” Maria had never heard him speak in so many words. It made her incapable of speaking. She suddenly wondered why Ashot spoke Russian, and she had never learned a word of Armenian or Abkhaz. “We’re leaving. Next week. May we live that long. At times like these, you have to be with your family.”

PMS.. 155 Urazbaeva

It started to drizzle. Maria looked at the patches of snow on the mountain slopes, wet and gray like dirty milk bottles. She was sure that wasn’t the snow her mother cried about. Ashot looked around and then at his house. “The wine is ready. The tangerines are falling off the tree. Rotting. How d’you leave home? My mother did. Came all the way from Turkey. Why didn’t she go west or north? Where’s your father? You know where he is?” Maria shrugged. “It’ll work out. You’re not harming anyone. Don’t go wandering around. The beach is mined too, they say.” He put his cap back on, tied the loose branch of the tangerine tree to the pole, and disappeared behind the gate.

Maria was washing the dishes in a small chipped tub when Yosif darted into the house. “I need money to hire a boat,” said Yosif, and threw his Adidas duffel bag on the table. “It’s the safest way. The roads and the beach are mined. Come with me. You’re Greek, they’ll be glad to help you. You can even ask for asylum in Greece. Isn’t your father Greek? I can help you and you can help me. We need each other, Maria.” Maria didn’t answer, but slowly backed away toward the door. She knew about the fighting in Sukhumi. A bloodbath on both sides. Was his wife killed by the Georgians or the Russians? Perhaps, murdered by her own, the Abkhaz fighters, for being married to Yosif, a Georgian? Maybe he had abandoned her and his sons to save himself. No, he wouldn’t leave his sons. They must be all dead. “I’m talking to you! Where’s the money? I know you have it. Your mother saved it, and it’s somewhere in the house. Where is it?” Yosif grabbed her hand. “Where is it? Are you deaf?” Maria shrugged. Everything seemed distorted, even the light on the table shivered, and the shadows from the chairs looked longer and more austere. “I know you have it. It’s mine! What did you do with it? Answer me!” He slapped her across the face with the back of his hand. The room shook and dissolved, dreamlike. Maria swooned and leaned against the wall.

156 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

Yosif looked around like an animal feeling that danger was near, and he had to hurry before time ran out. He pulled the drawers out of the commode, spilling the contents on the ground. Maria’s and her mother’s underwear and bras scattered across the floor, then stockings and socks, and sweaters. Yosif searched in the wardrobe, checking the pockets. A professional. Maria realized he had searched houses before. His hands swept under the mattress and released a cloud of feathers into the air, cutting open the Siberian pillow. Yosif stuffed his pockets with the cheap jewelry he once gave her mother. Maria couldn’t help thinking that the same hands had touched her mother’s body. He stopped, thinking what to do next, and headed for the kitchen. Maria didn’t move, listening to him banging pots, and smashing china, watching her home shatter. She wondered if that was how they left his apartment, after it was bombed and his wife and sons were taken away. The smoke was still visible over Sukhumi on a clear day, drifting over the water like stained fog. Maria stared at the floor. All her scarce possessions were out on the ground, broken, ripped, deformed. The money that her mother had saved was in the rolled-up black socks that were next to Yosif’s right foot. Maria glanced outside. The sun was rapidly setting behind the sea. He would certainly leave as soon as darkness settled. “You damn cow,” he slapped Maria across the face again, and noticed the locket under her shirt. Maria felt his thoughts, and backed away, covering her chest. “I know where the money is,” she shouted. “Show me.” “In the black socks,” she pointed down, behind him. He picked up the wool socks with unexpected agility, and pulled them apart. The money was tightly rolled into a tube held together by a black rubber band. He smirked. The sun glowed red across the room in its last moments above the horizon, and a lonely feather tinted pink slowly descended to the floor in a dreamy zigzag. Yosif ambled toward Maria. He put his hands against the wall, right above her ears, trapping her. His face was almost touching hers, and she could smell the sour cigarettes mixed with garlic on his breath. “It’s just the two of us now. We have to be nice to each other. I’m the only family you’ve got,” he whispered, and pushed a loose strand of hair away from her face. “You look just like your mother.” He pulled her hand

PMS.. 157 Urazbaeva away from her chest, down, toward him. “Touch me.” Maria yanked her hand, hitting it on the wall. “Do it, I said!” He grabbed her by the neck, and ripped the locket off its chain. She screamed. “Shut up! Or I’ll snap your neck like a chicken.” Before Maria shut her eyes she saw the magnolia leaves flutter in the crimson light.

The rain pounded on the tin roof of the shack, and thunder shook the walls. Rolled in a ball, Maria lay alone on her bed enveloped in down feathers. That night Maria died. And because she died, there was nothing to fear anymore.

By April, Maria finally acknowledged the slow, but deliberate changes in her body. Since Yosif’s visit, her mirror had been smashed, but even without it she felt the difference in her gait and in the flow of her movements, moods, and thoughts. At night, as she lay in her mother’s bed, she studied the soft slope of her abdomen that looked alabaster in the white light of the moon. She couldn’t suck her belly in as she used to when she was a teenager, trying to look as thin as her mother. For the first time in her short life she didn’t mind the heaviness of her hips. She caressed her extended abdomen, which seemed as large as the hill that protected the shore, and she knew she wasn’t alone anymore. Old Ripsime, who was still there, unable to abandon her house and animals, gave her more milk and eggs, because she had noticed the changes in Maria. They didn’t talk about it, but Old Ripsime kept repeating: “Who is we to judge? He decide who live and who die.”

Summer struck with excruciating heat, and gave license to more blood, as if it were the only reason for madness. The village was almost empty. At night, the soldiers came. Someone must have marked the houses for them. Timur’s family was beaten and shot, except for Gavriil, their youngest boy, who was seven and hid under the bed. He heard his family’s massacre, and his mother’s last words in Abkhaz. “Remember!” she screamed. “Remember!”

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He stayed under the bed until Maria found him there, a day later, after the soldiers were gone. She walked through the large empty house, which had been filled with noise and children’s laughter for as long as she remembered, and the only sound in this hollow space was the crunch of her feet on the crushed glass that reminded her of spilled sugar on the kitchen floor. The house had been looted, probably by soldiers and neighbors alike. It was a miracle no one found the boy. The old oak bed must have been too heavy to steal. Maria shared her food and home with Gavriil, made him toy men out of breadcrumbs and matches, but a week later he was gone, taking along her tape recorder and the remaining three potatoes.

Maria knew it was time to leave. She packed her bag and locked the door, then smiled at the absurdity of her actions. She knocked on Ashot and old Ripsime’s door. “With a load like that, Ripsime can help you deliver,” said Ashot rub- bing his eyes with soil-dirty fingers. “You could move in with us. Plenty of room,” he snorted. Maria didn’t answer. Her mind was set. She would go north. Old Ripsime took her to the kitchen and wrapped a large circle of Suluguni cheese, some cucumbers and onions in a kitchen towel. She filled a plastic Pepsi bottle with water from the pump and handed it to Maria. “Tzavet tanim,” she mumbled. “What does it mean?” asked Maria for the first time. “Let your pain be mine.”

Maria walked mostly at night, eating Ripsime’s food and whatever she found on the road. She drank from the scattered water pumps and went to public toilets whenever it was safe. During the day she hid in the snaillike swirls of the mosaic bus stops that used to be the pride of this part of the highway. She heard people shooting and shouting in Georgian, Abkhaz, and Russian. Men with rifles ran back and forth. Sometimes, she heard women, crying or screaming, but they mostly tried to pass unnoticed, just like Maria. Time lost direction, and the distance she could have covered on foot in two nights, took her ten days. Her clothes were dirty from the dust and grime of the road that stuck

PMS.. 159 Urazbaeva to the sweat soaking her dress. Her feet were swollen and black, with scratches, scabs, and infected blisters. Occasionally, she managed to wash in a sink or under a water pump, then wrapped her feet in strips of cloth she had ripped from her shirt. But while she walked, she had to pull them off to fit into her canvas shoes, because the road was too rough for bare feet. Not with the weight she had to carry. She had never been north of Gagra, and the beach looked austere, alien, rejecting her from its narrow and jagged space. The sun was barely showing its pink tip above the water’s edge. She looked around search- ing for a place to settle. It was time. She could feel it in her hips, which seemed to open outward like a giant gate, loose at the hinges. Maria squatted, leaning against an ancient tree at the top of the beach, her feet pushing at the rocks. She had laid a towel on the ground underneath her, and put a tightly rolled rag in her mouth, to muffle her cries, and to bite on in pain. She saw it in a movie once. Maria waited for the next round of contractions. She trusted her body would lead her. She just had to listen and be ready. She felt safer this way, without anyone near.

The clouds parted, and when the sun came out she held a baby boy in her arms. She washed her screaming child in the cold salty water, and rubbed him dry with the clean side of her skirt. She placed him in the rocks under a tree, and for the first time in her life, willingly submerged her body in the murky gray-green of the sea. Her cuts and blisters stung from the salt. She let the waves wash over her long hair and lull it back and forth. Maria removed her clothes, and the heavy water pressed around her aching hips and thighs, and lifted her breasts, heavy with surging milk. She washed her clothes, and came out of the water naked. She put on the only dress she had left in the bag, and dug a hole in the sand and pebbles by the tree. She placed a rag with her placenta inside, and dribbled the dry soil until it was level with the rest of the beach. The boy wasn’t crying, but making little sounds and moving his arms and legs under the dress. Maria cradled her child and gave him her breast. Their coming together was easy, as if they had known each other since her birth. Her other breast exposed to the morning breeze, she sat on the shifting pebbles, watching the rhythmic movement of the tide,

160 PMS.. poemmemoirstory which merged with the rhythm of the baby’s sucking. The water came and ebbed away, rearranging pebbles in its retreat. When he was done, Maria raised her boy, wrapped in an old cotton dress with polka dots and daisies, and showed him to the sun. She wanted someone to see him, to see how beautiful he was. She knew his name, but there was no one to tell it to and feel safe. “Tzavet tanim,” she whispered instead. Maria kissed him on the head, and set out along the beach, north, away, to the new border, carrying her baby-son.

PMS.. 161 Emily Rapp Black by Cat Davis

162 PMS.. Jamie McFaden

An Interview with Emily Rapp Black

Emily Rapp Black is an American nonfiction writer and essayist respon- sible for two memoirs, Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World. A former Fulbright scholar and James A. Michener Fellow, Black holds a BA from Saint Olaf College, an MTS from Harvard University, and an MFA in Fiction and Poetry from the University of Texas. In addition to her academic achievements, Black has received accolades and recognition for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Jentel Arts Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Fundacion Valparaiso, and Bucknell University, where she was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence. After stints teaching literature and writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles, UCLA Extension, the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop, the Taos Writers’ Workshop, the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, 24PearlStreet, the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and serving as the Joseph Russo Chair in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico, Black is now a permanent faculty member with the University of California-Riverside Palm Desert MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Performing Arts. Her work has been published in various well-known mediums such as VOGUE, The New York Times, Huffington Post, The Sun, The Rumpus, Popular Mechanics, Slate, Time, Redbook, Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, as well as other publications. Black currently reviews books on a regular basis for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. Black’s second memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, was hailed as a New York Times bestseller, an Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN Center Literary Award in Nonfiction. The novel chronicles her son Ronan’s diagnosis with Tay-Sachs and the limited and precious time Black spent with him in the months following the identification of the disease. In January 2015, the University of Alabama at Birmingham was for- tunate enough to have Black perform a reading from The Still Point of the Turning World and answer audience questions during UAB’s Visiting

PMS.. 163 Writers Series. Hearing her read some of the account of her life and experiences with her son’s Tay-Sachs diagnosis, while immensely poignant, provided a bit of humor to an otherwise notably bleak subject. In addition to the captivating vocal rendition of excerpts of her memoir, audience members were gifted with Black’s advice about taking time to experience life while in the midst of writing. Black urged audience members’ questions about writing their own life stories with a simple, yet poignant, “Nobody cares if you write a book…Only you care!” This real- ness translates beautifully, even shockingly, from her work right into the minds of her audience, making the text unforgettable not only because of its unique brand of tragedy, but also because it is accessible and candid. With such an immense talent for honesty, it comes as no great shock that Huffington Post has gone so far as to recommend Black’s work as “Required Reading for Women.” While reading The Still Point of the Turning World, I found it particularly helpful in dealing with what not to say to those in moments of duress and grief. Experiencing Black’s work inevitably serves to reiterate the importance of careful consideration and sensitivity when encoun- tering someone who has experienced or is in the midst of a personal heartbreak. The book captures various priceless instants between Black and her son while illuminating the catharsis involved in writing many of those moments as they unfolded before her. Black’s memoir reminds us that immense power exists in words, as she writes, “writing would not save Ronan. But, I thought, it might save me.” Black writes about grief as something brutally visceral yet survivable all at once. In her essay “Grief Magic” for The Rumpus, she says of the aftermath of Ronan’s passing, “In reality (not the self-created one), I’ve just weathered one of the worst possible scenarios an adult woman can face, and I’m still here. I survived the sorrow and am still reaching out for life.” In her work, we are able to glimpse her pain because she is blunt enough to put it out there—no frills and completely devoid of the candy- coating designed to help gulp the hurt down with greater ease. Still, hope exists even after that “worst possible scenario.” Black survives. She thrives. And she writes all of it straight. It was an honor to conduct this interview with Black about her writing process, her memoir’s reach, and what comes next. I hope you’ll enjoy reading her words as much as I enjoyed speaking with her about them.

164 PMS.. JM: You have been quoted as saying that writing about Ronan’s Tay- Sachs diagnosis was “cathartic” rather than “therapeutic.” Can you elaborate on what the writing process did for you as you struggled through such a tragic situation?

EB: The root of the word “catharsis” means to strip away, which I take as a directive: to write only what’s essential, to live only in the maxi- mum truth. There’s beauty in this process, even if the truth is brutal. Looking at things head on, for me, has always been a kind of coping mechanism, and in the course of Ronan’s illness, it served me well. When I was writing this book, I was miserable, and writing for the first (and possibly, I hope, LAST) time, became a source of comfort. In other words, I finally got a break. By engaging in making art, I could think about something hopeful, because there is hope in the act of making something out of nothing. I think art that is energized by this NEED to express oneself is some of the most satisfying art, perhaps because it makes the art feel necessary, whereas sometimes (and I’ve noticed this a lot more lately, especially in literary fiction), there’s a tendency for an ironic distance to permeate the prose in a way that, at least to me, feels off-putting and impersonal. Although I’m not in an actively tragic state of mind at the moment, I carry that tragedy with me—I feel it every day; when I deal with having a disability, and when I think about Ronan. In that sense, being a writer has been an important part of my ability to carry on and seek happiness. I certainly feel that my capacity for joy—creative or otherwise—has expanded as a result of going to the bottom of the grief well and thrashing around there for a great many months.

JM: What does your writing process for nonfiction work look like? Are there any specific quirks or superstitions you find yourself employing?

EB: I like to do research as a way of avoiding the actual writing! My teacher in graduate school called this avoidance behavior. I also tend to write around the issue and find my way in somehow. In the new book I’m working on, I had an epiphany in a yoga class, which struck me as ridiculously cheesy, but it really was where the

PMS.. 165 beginning of the book (at least in this draft) broke open, so I ended up beginning the preface with that realization. For me, once I’m hooked into a project, then I can’t help picking at it. It’s like having a zit or something—you just can’t help yourself! But until you get hooked, it can be a bit dispiriting. I don’t have any superstitions, although I prefer to write in bed.

JM: Many writers interested in producing nonfiction work find themselves asking, “Why would anyone want to know about my life?” What advice would you provide for these aspiring nonfiction writers wondering about how to get their process started?

EB: You need to look around at the other books in the world that are like yours or approach the same subject. What will you be contributing to the conversation? If you can’t answer that, then you should wait, or come up with another idea. The “WHY DOES THIS MATTER?” test also has to do with the necessity of including reflection in a piece of writing, a view from the “time of now” narrator’s writing voice. Otherwise, readers can’t make sense of what’s going on, and then they don’t understand why it would matter to keep reading. I do a ton of research into topics I’m interested in writing about. For example, my new book is about resilience, and although there are two books coming out about that topic, they are from a social sci- entist’s perspective, and both assume that one can “overcome” one’s traumas in some significant way, and that’s exactly what my book is arguing against. That said, if there were 100 books coming out about paperclips, a good writer would be able to write the best book about paperclips. After all, there are only so many stories in the world. It’s all in the telling.

JM: In what ways has The Still Point of the Turning World been received by those dealing with their own personal tragedies? How do you feel about your readers’ reactions?

EB: The letters that mean the most to me are those from parents of ter- minally ill children. It’s such a lonely world, that world, and to know that they felt less alone in such a dark place comforts me somehow. Of course, I get some interesting hate mail, but that can be weirdly

166 PMS.. amusing. It can be difficult to bear the emotional burden of different readers, but I’m glad that the book resonates with people who are struggling. I know how important it is to feel like you’re not alone in a tragic situation.

JM: What is your favorite element of your personal writing process?

EB: When the first and hardest stage is over, and the revision puz- zle begins. I like feeling like I’m digging deeply into the idea or the characters, when the book starts to feel like a living, malleable, POSSIBLE thing that is just barely out of reach. It’s the most excit- ing stage. You’re reaching for the carrot, but you can see it’s a carrot. You’re no longer reaching for a mystery. It’s that working in the darkness, having no clue what you’re doing that is the hardest part of the writing process.

JM: Tell us a little about what you’re currently writing. What will be the next book from Emily Rapp Black?

EB: I’m working on a novel about a woman’s experience of the afterlife, as well as a nonfiction book that is a study of resilience in the modern age. The resilience book, To Dance Again (tentative title), is still in the nascent stages, but I’m starting to feel my way through the outer layers of the topic to the core, and then I’ll work my way back out again. It’s been actually fun, in part because I don’t feel the race against time that I did with Still Point.

PMS.. 167

contributors

Amy Bailey is a writer living in Alabama. Her poems have appeared in Exit 13 Magazine, Shemom, Voicemail Poems, and Baseline, among others. Her essay “Anatomy Lesson” was recently featured in Blotterature.

Kimberly Ball is a writer and photographer. She attended Vermont College of Fine Arts and, currently, she is working on a novel in the Queens University MFA Program’s One Book Semester. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband.

Tina Barr’s latest book is Kaleidoscope. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the MacDowell Colony, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been recently published or is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Brilliant Corners, Hotel Amerika, Broad River Review, Gargoyle, Kestrel, Tar River Poetry, Town Creek Poetry, and elsewhere.

Heather Bartlett earned her MFA in poetry from Hunter College. Her recent work can be found in Barrow Street, Connotation Press, The Nervous Breakdown, Phoebe, and other publications, and her poetry chapbook, Bleeding Yellow Light, is available from Split Oak Press. Heather teaches writing at Cortland College of the State University of New York. She lives, writes, and grades in Ithaca, New York.

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, and The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her work appears regularly in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Slate, and many other publications. She lives in Palm Springs, California, with her husband, writer and editor Kent Black. She is a permanent faculty member in the MFA in creative writing and the performing arts at UC-Riverside Palm Desert.

M. L. Brown’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Blackbird, Calyx, Fourth River, and Not Somewhere Else

PMS.. 169 But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place. Her chapbook, We Go On, was a finalist in the 2013 Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Competition. “Synonym for Lichen” is, in part, an erasure of the entry for lichen found at the Merriam-Webster Online Concise Encyclopedia.

Grace M. Cho teaches in the department of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island—City University of New York and is author of Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War. In her spare time she runs a small baking company in Brooklyn, New York.

Casie Cook writes, works, and lives for summertime in Minnesota. She earned a BA in journalism from the University of Minnesota and is currently an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Hamline Univer- sity where she has served as creative nonfiction editorial board member and production assistant for Water~Stone Review. This essay is her first publication.

Melissa Crowe holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals like Atlanta Review, Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, and Literary Mama. She teaches writing and literature and edits at Beloit Poetry Journal, and she lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband, Mark, and their daughter, Annabelle.

Kate Daniels directs the Creative Writing program at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently A Walk in Victoria’s Secret. Her poem in this issue will be published in The Mind of Monticello: 50 Contemporary Poets on Jefferson (UVA Press, 2016)..

Jude Deason was born in small town Illinois. After years of taking trips on horseback, Deason took a more radical ride, leaving Chicago and her profession as a licensed clinical social worker for life on a remote ranch in northern New Mexico. It was then poetry entered her life in

170 PMS.. earnest. In her living room she has a large piano that she loves, but she doesn’t play it anymore, not after discovering poetry. Deason now lives and writes in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Deason has published the following poems in the following journals: “Goat Head Weed” in Willow Springs, “Sonoma” in Briar Cliff Review, “Honeydew” in Cold Mountain Review, “Santa Fe Luminaria” in Flint Hills Review, “Acorn,” “In New Mexico, Another Lover,” and “And We All Go Down Together” in Serving House Journal.

Mollie Hawkins is a native Alabamian currently residing in Sacramento, California, where she is a private school assistant librarian by day, coffee- slugging writer by night. She has written for Sheepshead Review, Marie Claire Magazine, and online at xoJane, Thought Catalog, Bustle, and is a frequent contributor to Hello Giggles. She also talks about Twin Peaks too much, and she is so sorry.

Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in poetry from Florida International University, where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative from 2013–2015, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, Tough Times In America Anthology, and Lucid Moose Press’ Like a Girl: Perspectives on Femininity Anthology. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is Workshop Coordinator for the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop. Jones is the recipient of a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and currently teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

Kateema Lee is a Washington DC native. She is a University of Maryland graduate, a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and an associate editor for the Potomac Review. She’s also an English instructor, and she teaches women’s studies courses for the Montgomery College Women’s Studies Program. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in print and online journals such as Poet Lore, Word Riot, Pirene’s Fountain, So to Speak: A Feminist Literary Journal, and others.

PMS.. 171 Colleen J. McElroy lives in Seattle, Washington. Winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award for Queen of the Ebony Isles, McElroy’s most recent collection of poems, Sleeping with the Moon (2007), received a 2008 PEN/Oakland National Literary Award. Here I Throw Down My Heart (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) was a finalist for the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Book Award, the Walt Whitman Award, the Phyllis Wheatley Award, and the Washington State Governor’s Book Award. Her latest collections of creative nonfiction include: A Long Way from St. Louie (travel memoirs) and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (finalist in the 2000 PEN USA Research-based creative nonfiction category). Recently, her work has been featured in The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Best American Poetry, Black Renaissance Noire, The Best American Poetry 2001, and online at TORCH and the Poetry Foundation. Many of her poems have been translated into Russian, Italian, Arabic, Greek, French, German, Malay, and Serbo-Croatian. Her tenth collection of poetry, Blood Memory, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Jamie McFaden holds an MA in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is a former Thomas H. Brown scholar. A Birmingham fitness instructor by day and freelance writer by night, Jamie has been published in Belles’ Letters, Sense Magazine, Aura, Mobile Bay Monthly, Alabama Seaport Magazine, and Birmingham Home and Garden. In her spare time, she enjoys experimental cooking, drinking cheap red wine, and getting weird.

Michelle McMillan-Holifield studied poetry and creative writing at Delta State University in the Mississippi Delta, where she received her BA in English. Her poetry has been published in poemmemoirstory, Lullwater Review, and Deep South Magazine. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas/Monticello.

Samantha Pious is pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Some of her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Lavender Review, broad!, Gertrude, Lunch Ticket, and other publications. Some of her own pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in Mezzo Cammin and on Philly Books and Culture.

172 PMS.. Sharanna Polk is in her final semester of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s graduate English program. Originally from Flint, Michigan, she relocated to Alabama to pursue a Bachelor’s in broadcast journalism from Alabama State University. The creative writer focuses many of her stories on under-represented members of society. She hopes to complete many novels and become a well-known author.

Emily Rems is a feminist writer, editor, rock star, playwright, and occasional plus-size model living in New York’s East Village. Best known as managing editor of the young women’s pop culture magazine BUST, Emily is also a music and film commentator for New York’s NPR affiliate WNYC and was the drummer for the feminist slut-rock band Royal Pink and the horror-punk band the Grasshoppers. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Cassette from my Ex and Zinester’s Guide to NYC as well as in Tom Tom Magazine and on The Awl. In 2014, she was both a featured panelist at Out of the Binders, a symposium on women writers in NYC, and a featured speaker on The New School’s panel “Music, Media, and The F Word.”

Mary Ruefle’s latest book is Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013). A facsimile edition of one of her erasures is now available from See Double Publications.

Jacqueline Saphra has won several awards including first prize in the Ledbury Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet, Rock’n’Roll Mamma was published by Flarestack, and her first full collection, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye), was developed with funding from Arts Council England and nominated for The Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. A book of illustrated prose poems, If I Lay on my Back I saw Nothing but Naked Women, was published by The Emma Press in November 2014. She is a tutor at The Poetry School.

Laura Secord is the author of the poetry collection, Becoming a Mojo Mamma, the verse play, Sanapia’s Courage Medicine: A Woman Healer’s Life in Poems, and the novel-in-verse, An Art a Skill, a Mystery. She has been a performance poet for over twenty years and is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at Sierra Nevada College. She blends the life

PMS.. 173 of a poet and performer with a thirty-year career as a nurse practitioner in HIV care.

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and author of the poetry collection, A Lesson in Smallness (The National Poetry Review Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as Blackbird, Carolina Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, Kenyon Review Online, Valapariso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. She is co-fiction editor for DIAGRAM and an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Zhanna Slor was born in the former Soviet Union and moved to Milwaukee with her family in the early 1990s. Currently, she lives with her husband in Chicago, where she is finishing up a young adult novel about Ukrainian-born twins with unusual superpowers. She has been published in numerous literary magazines, including Bellevue Literary Review, StorySouth, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Her piece “Because a Wall Fell Down,” published in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Winter 2013 issue, recently received a notable mention in Best American Essays. She also has essays forthcoming in the summer issues of Tusculum Review and Sonora Review.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania, raised in Alabama, and reared by the ghost of Hannah Arendt. She lives in Tuscaloosa with her partner and three small people who don’t believe she was a finalist in the Black Warrior Review’s annual poetry contest this year. Her syllables are forthcoming in Mulberry Fork Review, Avatar Review, Kindred Magazine, Rivet Journal, and others. Among her pivotal accomplishments remains the moment when her second grade teacher at Holy Spirit Catholic School told Alina’s parents that she had “potential.”

Julie Stewart lives in Indianapolis with her husband and their children. She primarily writes short stories. “By a Thread” is part of a collection based on the lives of three generations of women in her family, stories she wished she had known while growing up. Julie is also a visual artist. In her Clothesline Art, what the real world calls Narrative Textiles,

174 PMS.. Julie combines rescued fabric—lace from her own wedding dress, old socks, leftover thread—to create touchable stories that are best viewed outside on a breezy summer day. For the past year, she has been recopy- ing Anna Karenina by hand, as Sophia Tolstoy did for her husband. In her blog Sophie Speaks, Julie writes about the challenges of balancing daily life with creative work. She earned an MFA in fiction from Spalding University in 2010.

Judith Teitelman has straddled the worlds of arts, culture, literature, and business since she was a teenager and worked her first job as a salesper- son at a B. Dalton/Pickwick Bookstore. Just three months after graduating from UCLA with a degree in art history, she was hired to open and manage Art and Architecture Books of the Twentieth Century, at the time Los Angeles’ second bookstore devoted exclusively to the arts. She began her career in the nonprofit sector in 1983, and in 1990 launched her arts and business management consulting firm working nationally with institutions as well as artists from all disciplines. Judith continued her pursuit of all things literary and in 2008 was a finalist for a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship. This excerpt is from her debut novel, Guesthouse for Ganesha, a magical realist tale of love, loss, devotion, and spirit reclaimed.

Yellena Urazbaeva was born and raised in Russia. After graduating Moscow State Linguistic University, she immigrated to the U.S. Yellena worked in film in London, New York, and Los Angeles before turning to writing full-time. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Gail White is a formalist poet with work in many journals, including Measure, First Things, and Hudson Review. She is a two-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and a contributing editor to Light. Her latest book, Asperity Street, will be published in 2015 by Able Muse Press. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats.

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